The Cheater

by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

  “Embassy Suites Hotel,” a cheerful female voice said. “How may I assist you?”

  “Bryce Donnelly’s room, please.”

  “Certainly.”

  When no one answered, Lily called back and the same operator answered. “I need to leave a message for Mr. Donnelly.”

  “I’ll connect you to his voice mail.”

  “Wait,” Lily said, standing. “Can’t you just take a message?”

  “I’ll be happy to, but all I’m going to do is leave your name and number on Mr. Donnelly’s voice mail. That’s the way we do it.”

  “Fine.” Lily began speaking as soon as she heard the beep. “Please call me, Bryce. I don’t care how late it is. I won’t be able to sleep until I talk to you.”

  She started to call Shana at school, but she would sense something was wrong, and if she told Shana something might have happened to Bryce, she would be elated. She was still upset with Lily for marrying him.

  Lily knew she was being paranoid, but she couldn’t help it. The knot in her stomach told her something was wrong. What if Bryce had passed out in the street and had been trying to reach her when a thug came along and robbed him? In most instances, he should be able to defend himself, as long as the attacker wasn’t armed. Bryce wasn’t a lightweight in any sense of the word, but even a large man was worthless when he was drunk. As she thought about it, her concerns were replaced by anger. Regardless of what she’d said in her message, she refused to stay up all night waiting for a phone call. She was in the middle of a murder trial, and owed it to the victim to be mentally alert.

  “Damn you, Bryce,” Lily said, snatching the phones off the desk and carrying them back to the bedroom.

  Driving around with a corpse was a good way to end up in prison.

  After leaving the casino parking lot in Las Vegas, Anne had made it a third of the way to her house when she saw the flashing lights in her rearview mirror. Her heart began palpitating and her hands locked on the steering wheel. What had she done to cause the police to stop her? She hadn’t been speeding, nor had she made an illegal turn. Had someone seen her wrestling with Bryce’s body?

  Anne stared at the gas gauge. The tank was full. She could try and outrun them. An officer was already walking toward the driver’s door. She didn’t have a gun, and even if she did, she wouldn’t kill a cop. She stuck her head out the window, hoping it would block his view of her dead passenger, then mustered up her most innocent smile. “What did I do, Officer?”

  “Looks like your left front tire is low,” he said, squatting down to take a look at it. He stood and returned to the window. “I didn’t see a nail, but you might want to have it checked. Don’t want to have a flat, do you? This isn’t the safest town for a pretty girl like you to be stranded.”

  “Thanks,” Anne said. “I’ll take care of it right away.”

  He shone his flashlight into the car. “What’s going on with your friend over there?”

  This was it. If she didn’t do something fast, she would end up facing a murder rap. “Actually, he’s my boss,” Anne lied, placing her hands in her lap so he wouldn’t see how badly they were shaking. “We came here for a convention. Mr. Farnsworth had too much to drink. I got him to the car, then he passed out. I’m taking him back to his hotel.”

  “What hotel are you staying at?”

  Her mind went blank. All she could think of was the Aladdin where she had met Bryce, the last place she wanted to mention. “Oh, forgive me, Officer. I’m a little nervous. I’m afraid Mr. Farnsworth’s wife will think we’re having an affair. I’m staying with a friend. He’s staying at the MGM.”

  “You’re a good ways from the strip. Are you lost?”

  “No, no,” Anne told him, feeling queasy. “I thought if I drove around for a while, he might sober up. I don’t think that’s going to happen, so I guess I’ll head back.”

  He started to walk off, then yelled out over his shoulder, “Make sure to have that tire checked.”

  Anne waited for him to leave, but he was just sitting behind her in his patrol car. She drove to the light, then saw the sign that indicated it was legal to make a U-turn. She had to drive toward the strip or the officer would get suspicious. Just because he had let her go didn’t mean the incident wouldn’t come back to haunt her. The number of people who could place her in Vegas with Bryce had grown, and one of them was now a cop.

  The inside of the car was dark, though, and she wasn’t sure if the officer had been able to make out Bryce’s features, especially since his profile was the only thing visible. Still shaken, she smiled and waved to the officer as she drove past.

  Anne couldn’t allow a police officer to follow her to her house. Regardless of how meticulously she cleaned, she knew it could still contain evidence. Once the dust had settled over Bryce’s disappearance, she would rip out the cheap linoleum floors and replace them. The good thing about linoleum was blood didn’t sink through. Next, she would dispose of all the furniture, paint all the walls and cabinets, and list the house for sale at a bargain price. After this fiasco, she would stop using Vegas as a kill site.

  She drove a few miles, constantly checking her rearview mirror to make sure the police car wasn’t behind her. Maybe this had been a sign that she should stop. Ventura would be the perfect place to settle down. If the urge to kill surfaced, she would dope herself up until it went away. She could use some of the money she’d squirreled away to buy a nice house.

  Fairly certain the cop hadn’t followed her, she steered the Escalade into another parking structure. She circled until she reached the top level, then saw it was empty except for two dust-covered, dilapidated cars parked a substantial distance apart. People whose cars were about to be repossessed sometimes hid them in parking structures. Others reported a car stolen and stashed it until their insurance company issued them a check. Since hotel parking garages were private property, the police seldom patrolled them, leaving it up to the casinos to tow the abandoned vehicles. Cars could sit there for months, the casino operators afraid they would tow a gambler’s car and lose a customer. A lot of people didn’t use their cars when they were in Vegas, especially if they were cheap and old. With a handful of cash in your pocket and some decent threads, a guy who worked for minimum wage could jump in a cab and pass himself off as a high roller.

  She parked and turned off the motor, wanting to check Bryce again to make certain he was dead. The dosage of Versed she’d placed in his drink had been three times what she had used on her previous victims. Even so, she hadn’t expected it to really kill him. There was no telling how much alcohol he had consumed, and mixing it with a hefty dose of Versed might have been lethal. Bryce was a big man, though, and medication needed to be adjusted in accordance with a person’s body weight.

  Placing her cheek next to his mouth, she didn’t detect even a whisper of a breath. Then she checked his pulse again. She thought she felt something, then decided it was her own heartbeat. Maybe he’d had a heart attack. His mouth was open, and a combination of drool and vomit was caked on his lips. Her eyes filled with disgust. What had Lily ever seen in this man?

  Anne decided she wouldn’t be in this predicament if she had followed her own rules and not deviated from the plan. It hadn’t been such a big deal that she’d been seen with Bryce in the bar. There was nothing distinctive about his appearance. He looked like the majority of men who hung out in casinos. Bloodshot eyes, blubbery stomachs, tossing down booze as if it were water. She’d been too eager to get rid of him, and not merely because he repulsed her, but because she’d wanted to rush back and comfort Lily in the days and weeks that followed.

  Before she died, Anne wanted to experience love, respect, and loyalty. A man could never provide her with these things, as she wouldn’t let him. How could she? She knew how selfish and shallow men were, the meaningless promises they made to their wives and girlfriends, the disgusting thoughts that occupied their minds. Lily didn’t have to love her romantically, as sex held no interest
for her. Everything she craved could be obtained from a friend. Just a friend, she thought, tears pooling in her eyes.

  No one had ever genuinely cared about her, let alone loved her. Bounced from one foster home to the other, Anne had survived by remaining silent and detached. The fewer words she spoke, the less chance there was of provoking her foster parents’ wrath. Keeping to herself, though, couldn’t stop the other children from ridiculing her. Four of her toes on her right foot and three on her left had been so severely frostbitten, the doctors had been forced to amputate. Being abandoned hadn’t been enough. As a result of the cruelty inflicted by her father, she’d become a freak. “Go live in a circus, freak girl,” the kids would taunt, laughing and pointing at her feet. “Maybe they’ll feed you some elephant pies, or let you clean up the monkey cage.”

  She had arrived at her first foster home with a pair of crutches. They were not replaced as she grew taller, making it increasingly more difficult for her to walk. Many times she would crawl in order to give her weary body a rest. Her foster parents, knowing she wouldn’t complain, assigned her the worst chores. She cleaned toilets, scrubbed floors, washed dishes, changed dirty diapers. One time they made her cut the lawn with a pair of scissors.

  At night, her feet spasmed and her back throbbed from bending over her crutches. The people she lived with continually reminded her how lucky she was to have a roof over her head. Her disability and lack of social skills made it almost impossible to find a placement for her, and those who did take her in treated her badly. She rummaged around in her foster father’s pants one day while he was sleeping and stole enough money to buy a train ticket to California.

  Her next foster home had been located in a gang-invested neighborhood in Oxnard, but outside of being strict, Mrs. Diaz treated her fairly well in the beginning. As soon as Anne developed breasts, an older boy in the home named Ricky began talking dirty to her. Ricky climbed into her bed one night, holding her down and trying to force his dick into her mouth. It was a good thing Mrs. Diaz had heard her screaming and pulled him off her, because Anne had been about to bite his dick off. Her foster mother never punished Ricky because he was her son.

  By then, other young thugs in the area were also eyeing her. Anne was terrified of being raped, remembering seeing her father having sex with Mrs. Murphy. The next time Ricky got in her bed, she shoved her knee into his crotch, laughing as he limped off crying to his mother. Ricky swore Anne had kicked him for no reason, and of course, his mother believed him. She decided Ricky was going to eventually succeed and rape her, so she stole two hundred dollars from Mrs. Diaz’s purse and fled.

  Anne’s days on the street had been spent trying to remain unnoticed by people who would hurt or use her, picking through trash for food, and stuffing old newspapers into her clothes in an attempt to stay warm. Lack of proper nutrition and exposure to the elements had finally caused her to become psychotic. She would hold on to the rims of trash cans for days, believing she was still clinging to the fence along the interstate.

  When she was sixteen, a police officer stumbled across her, filthy and incoherent. The court committed her to a state-run mental facility for six months, then managed to locate another foster home. During the two years she lived with Mrs. Daniels, a seventy-three-year-old deaf woman, Anne became determined to educate herself. She caught up with her schoolwork and managed to graduate from high school.

  After she turned eighteen, the state was no longer legally obligated to care for her. Anne secured her first job in data entry at VPA Computer Systems. Mrs. Daniels was so crippled and demented by then, she failed to realize she was no longer receiving financial aid for her ward. Anne continued to live in the tiny room at the back of her home, the first decent environment she had ever had.

  When old lady Daniels died, Anne carried her frail body to the attic. The dilapidated house was paid for, but she had to find a way to cash the woman’s Social Security checks so she could pay the utilities. When they disconnected the electric and gas six weeks later, Anne panicked. She remembered all the times the power had gone off when she was a child, and how terrified she was of the dark. She decided she had endured more than her share of hardship, and vowed to take charge of her life.

  She became proficient in the art of disguise. She went to a costume store and rented a white wig, a pair of thick glasses, and a padded undergarment that went with a Santa Claus outfit. Using an eyebrow pencil, she etched in wrinkles around her mouth and eyes, smeared lipstick on her cheeks, and caked on a ton of powder. She then put on one of Mrs. Daniels’s better dresses and headed to the bank.

  The teller had counted out the money without making eye contact. Old people were invisible, Anne decided. She assumed it was because no one wanted to be bothered, or perhaps because an older person reminded them of their own elderly parents and the guilt they carried for not caring for them properly.

  Along with her salary, Anne had saved whatever money remained after she’d paid the expenses on the house, and used it to purchase prostheses for her feet. By then, technology had made it possible for her not only to walk, but to even jog for short distances. She didn’t do these things without pain, but physical pain she could handle. With opaque stockings, she could almost pass for normal.

  Her first break came when a middle-aged man named Doug Talley at the company where she worked took an interest in her, and decided to teach her the basics of computer programming. She learned fast, and Talley quickly became a role model and father figure. When he later invited her to his apartment and tried to coerce her into having sex with him, he reinforced Anne’s belief that all men were perverted and evil.

  The stench inside Mrs. Daniels’s house became unbearable and the attic windows were covered with swarms of flies. She realized it was only a matter of time before the flies accumulated on the downstairs windows and someone notified the authorities. Since Mrs. Daniels had been deaf and couldn’t hear the doorbell, no one stopped by to check on her, and to the best of her knowledge, she had no living relatives.

  When Anne decided she could no longer remain in Mrs. Daniels’s home, she rolled the woman’s decomposing body into a moth-eaten rug from the attic, dragged her to the living room where she had found her and propped her up in her recliner in front of the television. She had no idea how long Mrs. Daniels remained there before her body was discovered by the authorities.

  Moving to an inexpensive apartment, she began to hone her body. Because of the cheap food she’d always eaten, she was fifteen to twenty pounds overweight. She dieted and exercised rigorously.

  Her goal was to become the spider to the fly.

  The first person Anne murdered had not been her father, as she’d stated in the recording she sent to the FBI. She had never seen her father again, nor had she made any attempt to locate him or her mother. As she grew older, she realized her mother was partly responsible for what had happened. She had failed to protect her child and remained married to a drunk, worthless excuse for a man, who consistently abused her daughter. The woman she had worshipped had also been a drug addict. She recalled seeing her father sticking needles into her arm, and her mother smiling and telling her it was medicine, then getting a dreamy, faraway look on her face. Even if her mother was afraid of getting arrested, there was no excuse for abandoning her daughter.

  Anne became convinced that most men were no different than her father, and the only way to relieve the volcano of emotional pain inside her was to kill as many of them as she could. Needing to practice on someone, she chose as her first victim a bum who called himself Blue. Not the kind of thing she wanted to brag about to the FBI, the agency that tracked the most lethal and, as she saw it, the most intelligent criminals in existence.

  Anne took great pride in her work. The majority of people couldn’t get away with killing one person, let alone a whole string of them. The problem was she couldn’t bask in her accomplishments. Besides, the only individuals who could appreciate her skills were police officers, and even they did
n’t truly appreciate her. Other than the idiots of society who were fascinated with serial killers, her primary fan club was the FBI’s elite unit that dealt with serial killers.

  Even her first kill had been perfectly executed.

  Anne knew Blue from her days on the street, and he seemed to be an excellent candidate. She didn’t hate Blue. He had never done anything to hurt her, but he’d also done nothing to help her. A good beggar and an even better thief, whenever Blue scored cash, he headed straight to the liquor store. For six months, she had lived in a cardboard box only a few feet away from him. Blue had known she was a kid, and also knew about her deformities. One of the other homeless people had stolen her shoes on a particularly cold winter night, and Anne had run to Blue, sobbing hysterically as she told him of her fear that she would lose more toes to frostbite. Finding himself with a full cup at the end of the day, Blue had taken off to the Salvation Army to see if he could get her a pair of shoes. Instead, he had returned drunk, clutching an empty bottle of cheap whiskey.

  Anne had witnessed a murder once when she was twelve, which she now believed had been the onset of her bloodlust. She’d been living in Mrs. Diaz’s home in Oxnard at the time. She never told anyone about what she saw, even when the police came around asking questions, because she was afraid her foster parents would punish her for going outside without their permission.