She was trapped inside the house-there were no other doors!
Jerry bolted into the living room and sprinted toward her. Ann darted over to the spiral staircase and stubbed her toe as she scampered up the wrought iron stairs toward the second floor. She glanced down in terror as she eyed Rankin, racing up toward her holding a bloody towel against the side of his head.
Ann stood frozen on the landing, uncertain of what to do next. Rankin was halfway up the stairway by now, a sinister grin on his face and eyes that meant murder. Ann glanced further up the staircase at the hatch leading to the loft and knew she had no choice but to ascend the stairs further and pray she could get through the hatch before Jerry Rankin caught up with her.
Ann bounded up the stairs, taking two at a time. reached the top, pushed with all her might on the hatch door using both hands and her shoulder. The door was incredibly heavy but finally gave way with a creaking twang of springs. Ann suddenly felt a hand snatch her by the ankle. She glanced down at Rankin and saw that he had reached through the stairs and grabbed her. She screamed and jerked her ankle away from his clasped hand as a sudden jolt of adrenaline kicked in then managed to climb up the rest of the way into the loft It was pitch dark…
She grabbed the edge of the hatch door and slammed it shut just as Rankin reached the top. Ann could see the faint outline of the door where light shone through the edges and hopped onto it, praying that Rankin would be unable to force it open. As she felt the door pressing upward against her weight, Ann groped around in the darkness for a latch of some kind to secure the door.
“Open this fucking door, bitch!” Rankin screamed in rage.
His voice sounded different for some reason-so different that Ann actually wondered it were really Jerry Rankin on the other side of the door.
With her heart nearly bursting out of her chest, Ann scraped along the edge of the door with her fingers like a blind person who had just dropped his last penny on the floor. Suddenly she felt something cold and hard. She traced her fingers along it. A latch! She grasped the nub of the bolt and slid it home, tearing a pair of her fingernails in the process.
She was safe!
At least for the moment.
She heard Jerry’s muffled profanities through the thick door as he pounded on it repeatedly with his fists. Ann could smell the pungent odors of paint thinner and linseed oil as she stood up and looked around the dark room. Her eyes eventually adjusted to the weak light somewhat as she noticed several rectangular shapes silhouetted against a large window.
His paintings, she thought.
She could just make out the vaulted ceiling as she recalled seeing a small balcony jut out from the third floor of the A-frame during their tour. Maybe that could be her ticket to escape.
She felt totally disoriented in her panicked state in the darkness.
She needed some light.
Once she could see, she would head for the balcony and pray that she could get away from Jerry Rankin.
Ann realized she was trembling from head to toe as she began inching her way toward the window, her hands swatting in the darkness before her. She came upon an object and touched it gingerly. It was a huge canvas board mounted on an easel. She sidestepped the painting and continued. In another few steps she bumped into a heavy object-a table. She groped around on the tabletop and could feel tubes of oil paint, a tin can and the base of what felt like a table lamp. Jerry was screaming at her unintelligibly and still pounding on the door as she ran her hand up the lamp until she felt the gooseneck that terminated at a light fixture. She felt the bulb inside the housing and ran her finger along the housing until it hit home. With a grateful sigh she pressed the button.
The room became bathed in light. The first thing she saw was the table and all of the scattered paint tubes and brushes upon it.
The next thing she saw caused her to scream and made the hair on her neck stand on end An enormous oil painting on an easel.
And unlike the rest of Jerry Rankin’s paintings, this was no abstract study.
Instead, it was a traditional rendering of three nude women, lying side by side, flat on their backs in identical positions. All three were evidently dead and had “May Day” inscribed across their breasts in what appeared to be bright red lipstick. Ann gasped in horror when she spotted the vial of lipstick shoved up into the vagina of the middle woman’s spread eagle legs.
A woman who bore a stunning resemblance to Marsha Bradley!
Ann stood with her eyes transfixed and mouth agape, oblivious to the fact that Jerry Rankin was no longer screaming and beating on the door. She felt her stomach muscles tighten as she studied the image of the woman lying to the left of Marsha. Although she hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, Ann was almost certain that the woman was Sara Hunt. And when she looked at the woman on the right, Ann began to shiver. The woman bore an uncanny resemblance to herself, only with blonde hair!
And then she spotted something else, placed on the lip of the easel. Three Polaroid prints lined up in a row…
Shots of the nude bodies of Marsha Bradley, Sara Hunt and the blonde woman who resembled herself.
Jesus Christ! she thought as she felt the bile rise in her throat
…
Stanley Jenkins!
Jerry Rankin was Stanley Jenkins!
But how could he be? It was impossible!
Suddenly, she heard a whooshing noise coming from her left. Her eyes shot past the half dozen or so paintings to the sliding doors that led to the balcony just as Jerry Rankin was entering the loft.
“You’re going to die!” he hissed, springing toward her. Ann let out a shriek and ran for the hatch door. But Jerry Rankin was too quick. He caught her before she even had a chance to open the latch.
He was so enraged that he punched Ann hard in the face and forced her to the floor, jumping on top of her and pinning her down.
“I should kill you now,” he spat, his face only inches away from hers. “But not quite yet.”
Ann screamed hysterically and wrestled with him, but to no avail. He doubled up in laughter. “Don’t even try it, Ann. You’re no match for me!”
His voice had taken on the hillbilly twang again.
“Who are you?”
He glanced over at the painting then back at her and Ann could see his face clearly now. His left eye was green, but his right eye was brown.
Apparently, his other green contact lens had fallen out into the Jacuzzi when she’d slashed him with her wine glass.
Stanley Jenkins, she vaguely recalled, had brown eyes.
A hideous grin came to his face and instead of replying, he merely eyed her body for a moment and then stared at her expectantly, as if waiting for her to answer her own question.
Ann already knew the answer, despite the utter inconceivability of it. Her mind flashed back twenty years to the last time she could recall ever seeing or hearing Stanley Jenkins. She recalled his voice, a sort of whiney, nasal twang-just the sort of voice one would expect to hear from a nerdy egghead…
“Well, Ann? Who am I?”
Ann felt her heart bursting out of her rib cage. Stanley Jenkins had found her. Stanley Jenkins was going to kill her. Just as he had killed Marsha and the others…
She turned her head away from him.
“Stanley Jenkins?”
He grasped her chin in his free hand and jerked her head back around. He was leering at her as he said to her in a confidential tone of voice: “It didn’t have to end this way, Ann. I told you that this room was off limits. But you just had to come up here anyway, didn’t you? And now you’ve discovered my little secret.”
“Why did you kill my friend? And the others?”
“Your friend?” he retorted with a smirk. “Marsha wasn’t your friend, Ann! She deceived you! She went behind your back and played a trick on you. She and that deplorable Sara Hunt bitch!”
Ann’s eyes widened in absolute shock. “What in the world are you talking about?”
; Stanley loosened his hold on her and shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you? You have absolutely no idea what happened, do you? I’m very disappointed, Ann. Hell, you’re every bit as naive as these other stupid women! Now you’re probably going to disappoint me even more and tell me that you don’t remember my asking you out to the Prom our senior year. Please, Ann! Don’t let me down. Tell me that you at least remember that; or was it so fucking insignificant that it has slipped your mind after all of these years?”
“I-I remember,” she stammered.
“I’m impressed! You were at a basketball game, cheering the team on in that cute little mini skirt that showed your ass so nicely. I was watching you from the bleachers, doing your splits and getting tossed in the air so high that I could see the crotch of your red panties as clear as day! I never got tired of watching you, Ann. You were so beautiful, so damn classy! I never failed to get excited whenever I watched you-it didn’t make any difference what you were doing-studying, watching television, taking a bath-it never failed to give me a hard-on! It didn’t take too long to realize that I wanted you more than anything else in the world. You became my only reason to exist for quite a while, in fact. I dreamt about you every night, after I went to bed, I dreamt of someday having you all for myself. To hold you and touch you and have wild, kinky sex with you. God, you were all I could ever think about! And I made a vow to myself that someday I would have you.”
Ann stared up at him as he spoke, as intrigued as she was mortified by these disturbing revelations. He paused just long enough to climb off of her and re-situate himself, kneeling on one knee as she remained lying flat on her back.
“I had it all figured out, Ann. My plan was to put you under surveillance and learn all I could about you without your ever knowing it. I started following you home from school and at night, hanging around your house and spying on you. Your house was perfect-lots of windows and neat places to hide without being seen by any of the neighbors. You lived alone with your mother and she went out a lot, too, which really helped. Anyway, I did this for practically our entire senior year, and in that time I’d discovered a lot of interesting things about you. Besides the obvious fact that you had the most luscious body I’d ever seen, that is.”
He winked and grinned impudently at her when he said this, sending a cold chill down Ann’s spine. She looked way from him and found that what he was telling her was simply too hard to believe.
“I never had much luck with girls at school, as you no doubt recall. They all thought that I was some kind of nerdy do-gooder and even I know they thought I was uglier than sin. I couldn’t change my looks any-mother wouldn’t let me-so I figured that if I could somehow attract you in a spiritual way, I might have a chance. My plan was to show you how well I knew you and that I understood what made you tick, Ann. I thought you’d be impressed and would go out with me, because you were different from the others. You had a heart. I snuck into your house once and read your diary. I discovered by reading it that you had compassion for others less fortunate than yourself. You felt sorry for your mother because your father had died when you were so young. You felt sorry for your friends for various reasons: one got knocked up by her boyfriend, another got jilted by hers, and so on and so on. But you never felt sorry for yourself. You cared for others more than you cared for yourself-you were a true “giver.” I thought that was so classy! I had myself convinced that if I played my cards right and approached you at just the right time to ask you out on a date that you’d do it. And you probably would have, if it hadn’t been for your so-called friend, Marsha Stillner.
“That bitch fucked me up at that basketball game, Ann. She and Sara Hunt were sitting together and called me over to them. I asked them what they wanted and your dear friend Marsha told me that you wanted me to ask you to the prom. I didn’t believe her at first, of course, but Marsha was such a great actress! She kept a straight face and insisted that she was telling the truth. Sara Hunt then gave an Oscar winning performance as best supporting actress. She looked at me right in the eye and said, ‘Ann knows that you have the hots for her, Stanley, and she thinks you’re really cute. She’s been waiting for months for you to ask her out, but she’s afraid you won’t have the nerve to do it.’
“I flipped out when she told me this. All of a sudden I started thinking that maybe you knew I’d been spying on you all this time and that you were letting me watch you through the window because you enjoyed entertaining me! Like, you were being coy with me. I got all excited, thinking that this was turning out even better than I’d dreamed it would and I thanked Marsha and Sara for the tip. I went down near the sideline and watched you a little longer, trying to get my nerve up. Then, just to be on the safe side, I quickly looked up at where Marsha and Sara were sitting, half expecting to see them doubled up in laughter over their little joke. But they weren’t laughing at all. In fact, they were watching the game and seemed oblivious to anything else.
“That convinced me that they were on the up-an-up. So, I mustered up all of my courage and walked over to you. Then I asked you out.
“The rest, as they say, is history.”
Stanley stood up walked over to the balcony door and examined the wound on his face in the reflection. Ann was frozen where she lay, overwhelmed by what he had just told her. She considered making a run for it but knew that it would be futile. She wanted to lash out at him, tell him that what Marsha had done over twenty years ago didn’t justify his murdering her. But she remained silent. Stanley Jenkins was clearly off his rocker, schizoid. There was no sense in trying to rationalize anything with him. He was also a cold-blooded killer, and she realized that it was just a matter of moments before he murdered her as well.
She was not in any hurry to die, though.
Stanley turned around and strode over to her, dabbing at his wound with a towel. He had tears in his eyes. He stood over her and forced a weak smile.
“You might as well have killed me that day, Ann. I was shattered by your refusal and really angry that I’d fallen for your friends’ little scheme. Now, maybe you can understand why I got great satisfaction killing them. They fucked me up royally and deserved to die.”
His tone of voice sharpened, his self-confidence returned. “I went into seclusion after that incident at the basketball game. I still wanted you in spite of what happened but I knew there was little I could do about it at the time. After graduation, my parents all but forced me to go away to college so I started taking courses that summer. In a way, I didn’t care-I just wanted to get away from Smithtown. I did drugs, a lot of drugs, and I didn’t give a flying fuck about my grades or my parents. I had hit the skids and just wanted to try to have fun for a change.
“Then I laid eyes on Cindy Fuller for the first time at a party one night. She reminded me so much of you! I started following her around and spying on her, all the time pretending that she was you. Then I made the same mistake yet again-I asked her out and she refused me. I got really angry and wanted to kill her. Sam has already told you all about the fire and all of that, so I won’t bore you with it.”
Ann flinched at the mention of Sam. If only she’d listened to him “While I was in the nut-house,” he continued, “I made a vow to myself. When I got out, I was going to change myself, make myself a better person. Not long after I finally got released, I received a rather tidy life insurance settlement, thanks to my recently departed father. I went to Vegas and studied the tables then figured out how to beat the system. I got fucking rich, all in the matter of a few months. I took all of my winnings to L.A. and began devising my master plan.”
Stanley paused a moment and stared thoughtfully at Ann. “You can get up, Ann. You’re uncomfortable. Don’t worry, I’m not going to harm you.”
Ann knew this was a lie but stood up nonetheless. He winked at her then strode over to a stool near the window and gestured toward it.
“Why don’t you sit here?” he said. It was more of a command than a suggestion.
S
he nodded and went over to the stool, sat down. The wood was cold and hard against her damp swimsuit as she tried futilely to quit shivering. It was becoming increasingly apparent that Stanley had a dual personality-a sort of Jeckyl and Hyde persona. And at the moment, he was assuming a sort of unsettling combination of both characters.
Jenkins sauntered over to the painting of the nude women and studied it for a moment, then turned around and faced Ann.
“I kept totally to myself while living in L.A. In fact, I was virtually incognito. I rented a beach side villa under a fictitious name and spent the next year there making dozens of overseas calls to Europe and fooling around with personal computers, which were just beginning to appear in the consumer market. I was absolutely fascinated by computers, so I started writing my own programs and finding ways of patching into, at that time, the relatively infantile internet as well as various data bases.
“My plan was simple, but time-consuming to execute. I had three objectives: One was to locate a plastic surgeon out of the country who was not only really good, but who could also be bribed. Secrecy is the key, Ann. As they say, ‘loose lips sink ships.’ It was my intention to have reconstructive surgery performed on my entire face. In other words, turn my ugly face into a handsome one. It was not my intention, though, for anyone to find out about it. Thus, who ever performed this transition was going to have to keep silent as well.
“My second objective was to assume an entirely new identify. Ironically, that was probably the easiest of all to execute-just a matter of checking out court records and locating the right name of the right person, then obtaining a birth certificate.
“My third objective, having gotten my new face and name, was to actually make myself become this new person. This was not easy, to say the least, but I was quite determined. I stayed in Europe after the surgery because I realized that the most effective way to dramatically change my speech, mannerisms and personality was to get saturated in a totally different environment other than the one I’d been accustomed to. Europe is so wonderful, Ann-so different from the States. The people there have a lot of class and impeccable manners for the most part, unlike we Americans. I assumed a sort of aristocratic demeanor, a rich American who knew how to live the good life. I traveled extensively around the continent, carefully observing the people and absorbing their more appealing qualities and making them my own. I got pretty good at it, as you already know.
The May Day Murders Page 29