Unfortunately for Kathy Monroe, Frank De Palo had other plans for the woman’s future and a vacation didn’t enter into them.
Like any good cat burglar, he waited until he saw the lights go out in Kathy’s upstairs bedroom before he made his move.
Instead of walking back around to the front door and coming in that way, which he’d done on numerous occasions to other houses, Frank decided tonight he would use the roof. Maybe because the French doors on the second-floor balcony made a perfect entry point. Not only was it the darkest part of the backyard, but on one of his previous visits he’d fixed the lock there so it would easily stay open. That is, if no one else had tampered with it.
He pulled on a pair of gloves from his bag, then went over to pick up a deck chair from the back terrace that he thought would easily hold his weight. He carried the furniture over to the lowest roof point and positioned it so that he could reach the overhang.
He went back for his tool bag, grabbed the mask and stretched it over his head. He zipped the bag closed then hurled it up and over the railing where it landed with a slight thud on the concrete.
Hoisting himself up to the eaves, he grabbed the drainpipe, shimmied along the rim until he could throw his leg onto the roof. Balancing like an acrobat on the narrow ledge, he finished his climb the rest of the way across, edged his way around, no more than five feet, and dropped onto the balcony where his satchel already sat.
He checked the double doors and found the latch just as he’d left it. A simple piece of Scotch tape over the mechanism had prevented it from locking. He loved homeowners who didn’t bother securing every door in their house before going to bed.
He picked up his bag, turned the handle and stepped into the master bedroom where Kathy’s mother, Louise, normally slept. But since Frank had done his homework he knew Louise was three thousand miles away and that Kathy was alone.
The carpeted floor muffled his footsteps as he narrowed his eyes, scanning the already familiar surroundings. Since this would act as his staging area, he began to shed his clothes. He stripped down to skin. From the bag he took out his knife and this time, a Beretta.
He left the mother’s bedroom and walked down the hall to Kathy’s.
Kathy had left her door open. And she wasn’t asleep yet.
Kathy thought she heard a scraping sound outside, and then a thud. She tried to get comfortable again. But when she heard the same noise again, she lifted her head to try to pick up where the bump-in-the-night came from. It sounded like someone walking on the roof—which was impossible. Kathy knew that. But then she heard what sounded like the floor creak, maybe down the hallway. Once again, she convinced herself she had to be imagining things. Her mother wasn’t home so it had be the house settling. She rolled to her back.
And that’s when she spotted him.
She blinked and tried to focus on something other than the dark figure looming in the doorway. Her eyes locked onto a man wearing a mask over his head. The knife he held in his fist glinted silver.
She panicked and grabbed for the phone on the nightstand.
But Kathy wasn’t quick enough.
The man had already closed the distance. With his gloved hand, he brought the blade down, slicing a gash into Kathy’s arm. Blood flowed from the wound which seemed to piss him off.
“Damn it! Look what you made me do!” Frank screamed as he yanked the charger from the outlet along with the cell phone and threw both up against the wall.
By this time, Kathy realized her attacker was naked—and fully erect. Even with what little light the bedroom offered, she noticed the deep brown of his eyes—and how empty they were.
She felt a muscular hand clamp down around her neck to drag her to the floor.
“You’re lucky it isn’t your hair,” Frank hissed as he leaned over and then straddled her torso.
When she started to scream, he slapped her face. He put the cold blade of the knife under her chin and made sure she felt the skin prick and the trickle of blood it left.
“Try to fight me, and I’ll slice your throat open right this minute. Nod if you understand?”
Terrified, Kathy nodded.
Kathy saw the knife move as he used it to cut the T-shirt she had worn to bed down the middle of her chest, exposing her breasts. He squeezed a nipple hard several times and then wrapped his fingers tighter around her neck. “You want to make me happy, right?”
Kathy’s head bobbed up and down again. She could tell he got excited at that. But the pressure increased around her throat. She could barely breathe. She thought she might lose consciousness.
Right before that happened though, he loosened his grip. “Good. Now this is what I want you to do.” In spite of the blood streaming down her arm and neck, he took her hand and brought it up against his lower belly, then slowly glided it down to his hard penis. He raised her head up slightly so she could put it in her mouth.
“But…but…my arm is bleeding. It hurts,” Kathy protested.
“Huh, I didn’t notice that. Stupid bitch,” he snarled. “Of course, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig. You made me cut you, didn’t you? Do what I tell you. Put my dick in your mouth.” When the young woman balked again, rage took over. “I thought you said you understood. Apparently you have a problem with basic instructions. Looks like you’ll need a lesson in following directions.”
And with that, Frank started carving.
Chapter 15 Book 2
By eleven o’clock, the rain had turned to a steady downpour and forced Josh and Skye to retreat back to the warmer, drier confines of the loft, making for an early night.
While they spent what was left of a quiet Sunday evening at home, the couple had no way of knowing what kind of grisly scene played out in another neighborhood a mere eight blocks away.
They’d taken their showers to wash the street off, fixed hot chocolate with little marshmallows, and were now stretched out in the king-sized bed with their laptops resting on their legs while ESPN rehashed the Seahawks game, quarter by quarter, on the flat-screen TV. Every so often Josh looked up from his computer screen to see the fifteen-yard touchdown pass completed in the second or the fumble at the goal line in the fourth.
“Nothing like football in the fall,” Josh murmured as he finished his email to his marketing team and hit send.
“We’ve mined data from every source we can think of and we still don’t know anything about this sick bastard,” Skye groused as she took another sip from her mug.
While the announcer on TV went over the other late scores on the West coast, Josh shut down his computer.
And suddenly the temperature in the room dropped—noticeably. Like an Arctic wind whipping out of the frozen tundra, it nipped and bit.
“Did you feel that?” Josh asked.
In tune with the jolt and each other, their heads turned to stare.
“You mean that intense cold chill? Hard not to,” Skye said. “Especially when it brings the temp in the room down a good ten degrees.”
“Something just happened to cause the room to turn into a freezer section.”
Instead of reaching for the covers, Skye bolted off the bed, snatching up her cell phone off the nightstand. “Death. Darkness. Another victim.”
Understanding had him leaning across her side of the bed. “Do you really think Harry will believe you, Skye?”
“After pulling us into this thing, Harry had better. Did you get anything just now? Any bursts of energy, or flashes?”
Josh didn’t have to ask what she meant. “Darkness, same as you. That’s what hit me first. Second, a life ending. Next, a subdivision with a gate out front. A man peeping through an open window. He uses a chair to get up to the roof. The door’s unlocked.” Josh frowned. “She left her door unlocked. No, wait. He’d been there before and did something to it so it wouldn’t close properly. I saw a knife, lots of blood. That’s it. That’s all I got. Not that much really. How about you?”
Disheartened, Skye pushed th
e button to disconnect the call before Harry ever had a chance to pick up. “This is crazy, Josh. What do I tell Harry? This guy could be anywhere, in any number of neighborhoods that have a gate. Your parents live behind one.” She visibly shuddered at the thought of that. “It isn’t Laurelhurst, is it?”
“No. That much I know. What did you see just now, Skye?”
She shook her head. “Nothing we don’t already know. Darkness first, then a man standing in a house, carrying a knife, wearing a mask, and not a stitch of clothes on. I couldn’t get a read on the neighborhood though, Josh. No landmarks. Nothing.”
“See, this is exactly what’s so frustrating. As we sit here watching Sports Center, our guy is out there torturing another victim.”
Skye slumped back down on the bed. “He could be forty miles from here or forty blocks. He got undressed in that same room where he made his way into the house.” She chewed on her lip, trying to think of what she wanted to say. “Josh, there has to be a reason he wears that mask all the time at every crime.”
“To scare the bloody hell out of his victims and get them to cooperate.” But Josh thought about that a minute longer before adding, “What are you thinking?”
“Could he be some type of local celebrity afraid of getting recognized?”
“Holy shit, wolf girl. You might be on to something. He’s lean, fit, athletic. Local sports star maybe?”
“Maybe. Enough of a star that he thinks someone might see him without his mask and put two and two together.”
“Talk about crazy but his general description is perfect for some type of athlete.”
“Well, we know he doesn’t play football.”
“How do we know that?”
“You just watched highlights. The Seahawks were on the road.”
“Good deduction, wolf girl.”
“Stop calling me that! I could return the favor, you know, and call you wolf boy. How would you feel about that?”
“Come here and I’ll show you.”
“Is that all you think about?” she asked with a grin as she settled against his chest.
“Only when I’m awake,” he replied, kissing her hair.
She angled her body, reached up, draping her arms on both his shoulders. Their eyes locked as she crawled over his legs and onto his lap. She grabbed the end of her top, jerked it up and over her head, letting his eyes go wide at her boldness. She took his hands, guided them to each breast. “I need you to touch me tonight, Josh. All of me.”
Her hands snaked under his shirt where she ran her nails along his toned stomach. While working his boxers down and off, the breath whooshed out of her as he deftly reversed their positions.
Hunger roared up. Limbs tangled. Lips met. Tongues mated. Teeth nipped at soft flesh, grazed along tender skin.
His mouth settled at her breast. Suckling, long and hard, he lingered, drawing out the pleasure for both of them before moving down her body. Hovering over her, and then into her.
Warmth spread. The ripples made her shudder like rolling sprays of sea and foam. The spurt of climax burst forth powerful as lightning streaking across a thundery sky. Longing for more took root and bloomed as Josh drove, pumped, harder, faster. Glassy layers built, fast and hot, glory waiting at the edge.
Sinking, they plunged in free fall through the brilliant shine of shimmering gilded tide. The ebb and flow rushed them along melding heart and soul as one.
After a night tossing and turning, Josh wasn’t surprised when the phone woke him at ten minutes after eight. Trying not to disturb Skye, he rolled to his left to reach the ringing cell. Squinting, he grappled with the device before sticking it to his ear. The guy on the other end didn’t bother with preliminaries.
“Look, I hate to do this since it’s a rainy Monday morning, but I need you guys out at Brittany’s Landing A.S.A.P.”
Josh recognized Harry’s voice. “So that’s where he hit. Skye and I wondered. That’s only eight blocks from here. Let me guess. Single woman alone who lived in a gated community, felt safe and secure behind the walls. Our psycho had been there before and tampered with an upstairs balcony door to get in. He started the attack by slicing open her arm first…her right arm. It was another violent assault because he got pissed off that she wouldn’t do what he wanted fast enough.”
“How the hell do you know all that?” Harry barked.
“Let’s just say, I had a restless night. Give me the address.”
Forty-five minutes after Harry’s call and sitting in traffic for a short eight blocks, they pulled up to a gated subdivision. The place was fairly typical of an area that hadn’t needed a wall to keep people out when the homes were built decades earlier. But today, with all the police cars coming and going, the sliding gate between two stone pillars had been left open. After all, its presence hadn’t prevented a serial killer from breaching the false sense of security.
They passed manicured lawns covered with autumn leaves and orderly flower beds bursting with fiery colors. While the tips of evergreens, heavy with rain dipped and swayed in the breeze, the dreary morning couldn’t hide the fact that murder had taken place in the otherwise peaceful setting.
The address turned out to be what was commonly referred to in the region as a “Seattle box” also known up and down the West Coast as an “American Four Square.” This one wasn’t a typical “Prairie School” design but more in the vein of Spanish revival with its arched portico, red-tiled roof, and painted white stucco exterior.
“Hard to believe such horror occurred in such a cute little house,” Skye noted, crawling out of the Fusion.
“Maybe that’s why he picked it. Look around you,” Josh pointed out. “This one is more ornate, sticks out from the rest because of its color and unique design, a tad more upscale than the others.”
“You’re right,” Skye agreed, scanning the row of houses. “It does make a statement, attractive outside and trendy. He might consider the house and the gate something of a challenge.”
“And the woman inside,” Josh finished.
Harry met them at the curb, tossed two pairs of latex gloves at them. “Put these on. You know the drill. I appreciate you getting here so fast. Our victim is Kathy Monroe. Single but lives with her mother, Louise Monroe. Louise happened to be out of town on her first vacation since getting her daughter out of high school.”
“High school? How old is Kathy?”
“Just twenty years old, Skye. Youngest one so far. We haven’t even been able to get hold of the mother yet. Coroner’s here, but I’ve held the crime scene techs at bay because I wanted you guys to take a look at the bedroom first.”
Harry sent Josh a steely glance and said, “You may think you know what he did in there, but if you ask me, it’s another one for the books. He went ballistic on the victim. Cut her face up, cut off a breast, mutilated the rest of the corpse.”
Josh cringed. “The one on the left, the left breast, that is. I forgot to mention that when you called. I wasn’t fully awake yet.”
“What a homicidal freak,” Skye uttered as they followed Harry into a rustic Saltillo entryway with bold tones in cinnabar and spattering flecks of blue and jade-green accents. Skye did her best to get her mind off what waited in another part of the house.
Harry went up a curved staircase with Mexican inlaid tiles dotting the steps. Just as she’d decided that maybe the iron sconces on the walls added a nice touch, they reached the second floor landing—and she caught the iron smell of blood and death. Without anything on her stomach, Skye almost gagged.
But all of a sudden Josh stopped outside one door to the right of where they walked. Skye peered inside, saw it was the master bedroom. She watched as Josh drifted farther into the interior until he stood at the French doors. Even with the dismal weather outside, a wash of pearly light snaked in, one slice stretching across the room causing an eerie glow.
“He came in through here. Before that he used a chair from the patio to climb up to the roof and swing over to
this balcony.”
“Why didn’t he just use the front door?” Skye wondered aloud.
“He’s an adrenaline junkie,” Josh answered flatly.
“That plays into our local athlete theory,” Skye pitched back.
“Local athlete?” Harry asked with a surge of disdain rolling through him at the prospect of that. He rubbed his aching temple. “That’s all we need is to learn this bastard is in the public eye. You really think this guy might be well-known in the area?”
“Why else wear the mask?” Skye said. “If just one person recognizes him and you guys get any type of decent composite, he’s toast. He knows it. So he protects his face.”
“Maybe he has scars or tattoos on his face that stand out. That would be noticeable to a victim,” Harry said hopefully.
“Or maybe he’s a cop or a firefighter,” Skye countered, shooting Harry a challenged stare. At the incredulous look Harry gave her, she added, “They’re known adrenaline junkies, Harry. It’s a fact. You have to keep an open mind here.”
“Without a survivor to ID him, everything is speculation,” Josh surmised. When Harry grumbled at that, Josh went on, “Whatever he is, by the time he walked in through these doors, he was already wearing the mask. So it figures that hiding his face is the first step once he decides to head inside. There has to be a reason he hides his face, Harry.”
“At this point, I just don’t want to consider that our guy’s a cop, okay?” Harry fired back.
“I know you don’t,” Josh said in response. “But Skye’s right. Keeping the door open to possibilities will maybe catch him in the net faster. Whoever he is he’s physically fit.”
Josh took a few steps over to the bed. “This is where he took off his clothes. Once he got undressed, he took out his knife and his gun from the black bag he carries. But it was the knife he took down the hall with him to use on the victim. He left the gun behind. Not his usual norm.”
“He didn’t use a gun here?” Skye asked, glancing over at Harry for confirmation. When she saw Harry bob his head, she asked Josh, “Any chance you see this guy at all before he puts on his mask, say when he’s climbing up.”
Skye Cree Boxed Set Books 1 - 3 Page 44