Serial 4

by Lily White

  “What do we know?” Reluctance shadowed my question, but I needed to know how close they were to naming Veronica as a suspect for the crimes.

  “A man saw a body being dumped, the same body that the police picked up yesterday. He described a woman at the scene. I think we’ve been chasing the wrong killer.”

  “A woman wouldn’t fit the profile,” I reminded her, desperate to throw the investigation off course to protect a woman I couldn’t forget.

  Emily didn’t answer immediately, her words slow when she finally responded, “Profiles can be wrong, Blake.”

  Our eyes locked in response to her statement. “Rarely are they wrong,” I argued. “You know that as well as I.”

  Stepping away from me, she leaned up against another table, her eyes never leaving mine. “The call came in at 3:00 a.m. From what we can tell by early forensics, the body would have been dumped within an hour or two of that time. The man who called was able to identify features of the suspect and the body itself. His facts alone regarding the body are enough to lend credit to his claims. Within an hour of the call, the body was found by the local police department and a woman was located wandering the streets that matched the description of the suspect. I think this is a credible lead.”

  “Was the woman apprehended?”

  “No,” she admitted. “Due to our presence, the police followed her to what they believe is her home and contacted us immediately.” She paused again to allow the information to sink in. “The home is in the same neighborhood where some of the prostitutes have gone missing, Donovan. We need to move on this now before she runs.”

  Anger flared through me. “Why have I not been informed of this information until now?”

  “You’ve been busy. Surveillance has been established at the house in question and there doesn’t appear to be any person coming or going. We’ve kept this contained until such time as Jude Hollister could be freed. It would have been a political nightmare to pick up one suspect for the same crimes as the innocent man we were still holding in jail. Don’t you agree?”

  Nodding my head, I gave my face another good scrub with my hands. “What is the description of the suspect?”

  Relief washed over me when she answered the question. It wasn’t Veronica, the features didn’t match. But more questions filled my head with each word Emily spoke. Just how many people were involved in this game that Jude and Veronica were playing?

  “Fine. Let me gather these papers back into the files and we’ll go talk with this new suspect. Give me a minute and I’ll meet you at the car.”

  Giving me one curt nod of her head, Emily left the room soundlessly except for the incessant clicking of her high heeled shoes. The door slammed shut with finality in its tone.

  Gathering the documents together, I breathed out as I straightened the papers, tucking them inside folders that meant nothing to me anymore.

  I didn’t give a damn who this new suspect was or what information she could give us. If she was involved, she wasn’t acting alone and I knew better than any person the identity of her accomplices.

  Veronica wouldn’t waste away in jail if there was anything I could do to prevent it.

  She wouldn’t lose her monsters to the crawl of time within cement walls lined with steel bars.

  I would set her monsters free just so that they could continue to call out to my own.

  6 Patty Wilson

  “Sarah looks bigger, doesn’t she?” Patty said to her mother over breakfast two days after returning from the nightmare hell she’d endured.

  “Well she should, you were gone long enough,” her mom snapped and looked back at the little television set precariously on the counter near the microwave. Patty’s mom loved her shows, everything from daytime talk to small claims court, if it was on in the daytime, Patty’s mom watched it. “I hope that asshole, Jason, is finally out of your life.”

  Patty cuddled Sarah against her and fed her some more applesauce. Patty couldn’t believe how much she had grown during her time…away.

  Even now she couldn’t tell herself it was captivity. She put it in terms that distanced herself from the horror of it and the brutal disgust she felt every time she allowed herself to think about that other woman.

  The woman who could have been just like Patty with a baby girl at home waiting for her mommy.

  Patty felt tears sting the back of her lids and wiped her hand along her nose to stifle a sob. Crying wasn’t going to help. Focusing on Sarah and being the best person she could be was the only thing that would get her past this.

  Her hand still stung though, a dull throb that reminded her constantly of that broken body they’d left in the grass.

  Forcing herself to concentrate on the good things, like Sarah, Patty took a deep trembling breath and closed her eyes.

  “You ain’t gonna get her to eat like that,” John said from behind her. She looked up and he smiled at Sarah as he chucked her under the chin. “You gotta keep your eyes open and pretend the spoon is an airplane or something.”

  “You wanna do it?” she asked John. He’d seemed a little sad since she got back. He’d taken over as Sarah’s sole provider in the time that she’d been…away.

  “Sure, you goin’ somewhere?” he asked and Sarah giggled as he picked her up in his big arms and sat down with her on the table facing him.

  “I might see if they’ll hire me back at Wal-Mart,” she said. It was a lie. Patty just needed to get out of the house for a little while. In the short time she’d been back she’d been feeling more and more filled with self-loathing over the things she’d done. Even deep breathing and closing her eyes couldn’t keep the walls from pressing in against her.

  How could she hold her sweet baby girl in the hands that had helped murder another woman? How could she play with her little daughter when she had possibly deprived somebody’s kids of their mom?

  She was a fucking monster and no amount of booze or drugs was going to help her get over this.

  But she had to try.

  As much as she wanted to stay clean for Sarah, she had bloodstains on her hands now and no matter what she did, she wasn’t worthy to be Sarah’s mom.

  * * *

  She texted John to tell him to put Sarah to bed without her. She was on a mission tonight and she needed help getting there. She had to forget and she was going to do whatever it took to erase the last moments of that poor woman’s life from her memory.

  Strolling the strip, Patty didn’t recognize half the girls out working tonight. It was alarming how fast the turnover rate was. Patty liked to think it was due to girls cleaning up and getting out, but she knew the cold hard truth. Girls out here ended up dead in fields, sold for meth to different pimps, or simply vanished into the underground. She’d even heard of girls going as far as Mexico and Canada for the right price.

  Nobody ever came back.

  Except for Patty, but she wasn’t working tonight, she was buying.

  Finally she spotted a familiar neon pink ball gown clinging tightly to a masculine athletic body.

  Nancy. Surely she would be carrying tonight.

  “Shit, girl, I thought you got out. I was proud of you,” Nancy said as Patty approached her.

  “I haven’t used for a bit, but I didn’t get out,” Patty said, shivering and wrapping her thin arms around her bony frame. She had lost way too much weight when she was…away.

  “Where were you?” Nancy asked. “Jason came by looking for you a few days back. Said he’s in town and wanted you on his string again.”

  “Never again,” Patty replied, looking down at Nancy’s feet. Her feet were huge but her toes were painted bright red and her shoes were beautiful. It suddenly occurred to Patty that Nancy had once been a man. She didn’t know why she never noticed before. Too messed up perhaps, maybe she didn’t care. Not that she cared now, Nancy was good people. “You got anything for me?”

  “Oh honey, you don’t need that,” Nancy said. “Go home and get some rest. You look
messed up.”

  “I am messed up,” Patty said looking up at Nancy’s face with desperation clinging to her like a mask. “Please, I’ll take anything.”

  Nancy stared down at her and softened. She sighed and reached into her gown to some hidden pocket and pulled out a small bag of white powder. “It’s not the best meth I’ve ever had, but it should get you where you need to go.”

  “How much do I owe you?” Patty asked, taking the baggy in her trembling fingers.

  “You got any money?” Nancy asked skeptically.

  “No,” Patty admitted.

  “Shit, it’s on the house. Just be careful, you’re as thin as a rail and it will take less to fuck you up.”

  “Thank you,” Patty said and turned to leave. She needed to find a private spot to do it and lose herself for a few hours. As she was walking, she hesitated, turned back and said, “Nancy?”

  The older woman turned around and replied, “Yeah?”

  “You’re really pretty, you know. Don’t ever let anyone tell you different.”

  “Oh honey, I know that,” Nancy said but her smile was radiant at the unexpected compliment.

  Patty shivered harder as she walked to a small park a few blocks away. She huddled on a picnic table near some tall bushes out of the light and opened the little pack.

  She scooped some of the powder with her fingernail and snorted it in her right nostril. She followed in her left and repeated the entire thing a few times again.

  She felt better immediately. She laughed, looked up at the trees seeming to bow over her and dropped back onto the table. She couldn’t keep the wide smile off her face.

  She’d done her part, she’d helped out and she’d lived. She was here, she was free and little Sarah was going to be safe from the monster that had done those things to that woman.

  Patty could almost think about her now without being overcome with grief. The drugs made it all okay and helped her see clearly that it wasn’t her fault.

  Patty felt peace for the first time in a long time.

  “Put your hands up where I can see them!” a blasted voice broke through the night. Bright lights flared around Patty momentarily blinding her as she sat up.

  She carefully raised her hands and looked around for the source of the command.

  Out of the brightness a dark figure appeared. He was dressed all in black and as he got closer Patty could see he was wearing some kind of bullet proof vest that said FBI.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know what it was. I’ll never do it again,” Patty began to babble, assuming they were going to book her for drug possession.

  “Patricia Marie Wilson, you are under arrest for the murder of Crystal Kasch,” the man bellowed.

  “Who?” Patty sniffled and widened her eyes.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them,” was all the man said before he knocked Patty to the table and cuffed her wrists tight enough to bring tears to Patty’s eyes.

  Again.

  * * *

  “Crystal Kasch,” Agent Chase said with a sneer. “A girl like you, she worked the streets. Who put you up to this? Who were you working with? Your pimp?”

  “Jason’s gone,” Patty replied. The drugs were still coursing through her system but the hard edges of reality were coming back. “Wait, he’s not my pimp though. He wasn’t. He was my boyfriend. And no, nobody made me do anything.”

  “So you did it all on your own?” Agent Blake asked almost eagerly, leaning on across the table to stare at Patty right in the eyes.

  He made Patty nervous, like he wanted her to confess or something, but she wasn’t even sure what she was here for or why the FBI would be involved.

  “I didn’t do anything, I still don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Patty said as awareness crept even farther into her drug addled mind. They hadn’t picked her up for a dime bag of meth, they were talking about a dead girl.

  Patty had a lightning bolt of comprehension shoot through her. They were talking about the dead girl. The one she’d helped dispose of, the one who had been just like her.

  “She knows something,” Agent Chase said in a bitter tone. “This stupid little skank knows something and she’s not going to tell us. It’s probably her pusher or her pimp. There’s no way she could have handled all that on her own.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Agent Blake said thoughtfully. “These junkies are wirey strong. It makes sense though, all the girls have been working girls. Maybe this one just can’t handle the competition. She’s like the Wal-Mart of hooking, has to get rid of the little guy before she sets up shop.”

  “This is no time for joking, Agent Blake,” Agent Chase said in a low tone. “And I stand by my assertion that there is absolutely no way this little meth head could have killed and disposed of all those girls on her own. She had to have been working at the direction of the CK.”

  Patty had nothing to say. Anything she could add to the conversation would put Sarah’s life on the line and the meth had oozed out of her body enough by now to make her realized the bigger connection.

  She’d been held by the Cascades Killer. She’d survived to tell the tale, but if she wanted her baby to live, there was nobody she could tell it to.

  7 Jude

  I traced a beam of early morning light along Pet’s upper thigh and followed it to the soft plain where her leg met her hip. I thought about the intricacies just under the flesh, the bone and muscle and sinew lurking there amidst blood vessels and arteries. How easy it would be to slip a knife across her femoral artery as she dozed peacefully, but how difficult it would be to cut her up and remove her from my apartment.

  I couldn’t help myself, these things lurked in the quiet parts of my mind at all times. These dark thoughts would crouch in the corners until they sprang forth unbidden and unharnessed.

  Sometimes it took every ounce of my strength to not kill Pet. My sister, my lover, and half of myself.

  And like everything else in my life, I wanted to destroy her.

  She moaned in her sleep and a smile rippled across her lips. I wondered if I was the source of that smile, if even in her dreams she adored and served me like she did in her waking life.

  Or was it Blake in there with her now? Agent Blake who had clearly fallen in love with my Pet and taken her for himself.

  Or so he’d thought.

  All along, she had only given herself to him to gain leverage. To negotiate for my freedom. And what an excellent job she’d done at that.

  I pulled her close to me, kissed the soft flesh of her neck. I set my lips on the pulse fluttering just beneath the skin and had an intense desire to tear into it with my teeth, to feel the hot blood spraying me, coating me and painting me with her life force.

  I needed to kill.

  I’d been pent up for too long.

  I needed death like I needed air to breathe.

  “Jude? Babe? What are you doing?” she asked in her sleepy fuck me voice.

  “I’m waiting for you to wake up,” I told her and pushed her onto her back.

  “Why?” she asked with a half-smile on her face.

  “I think you know,” I growled and pushed her legs apart.

  It was like that every morning. My need was greatest when I first woke. My need to kill and fuck, tear and destroy.

  For now I settled on fucking my sister’s hot cunt to alleviate the urges building at the base of my skull.

  She groaned and clawed at me with her long fingernails. She arched up towards me and forced my full length inside of her.

  We writhed together, our bodies entangling and our hearts clashing into each other again.

  I could never get enough.

  * * *

  “It will look pretty obvious if we burn it to the ground,” I told Pet over breakfast later. After my brief incarceration, I decided to not return to my appearance of normal life. I hadn’t gone back to work and I hadn’t returned any of the guy’s phone calls. Luka had given up first, then Tony and finally
Marcus.

  It was freeing to finally let it all slide away. Besides, who wanted a suspected serial killer showing up at their wedding?

  It was gauche and would draw attention away from the bride. Fuck wearing white to a wedding, try being a notorious murderer to steal the spotlight.

  Alleged. I should remember to add that mentally so I didn’t slip up verbally at some point.

  Alleged murderer.

  They had nothing on me, but they would if the warehouse was discovered.

  “That’s the beauty in it,” Pet replied with a wedge of orange in her perfect, elegant hand. “We’re going to find that junkie I paid off. The one who called the FBI about Patty and the dead girl. That way we tie up two loose ends with one easy move.”

  “What about Patty? She needs to die, she knows too much,” I replied evenly. I was excited but didn’t want to let it show. Pet was surpassing any expectations I’d ever had of her and I was so damned proud.

  My father bred efficient sociopaths, I supposed.

  “Patty needs to take the fall, babe,” Pet replied and wrapped her gorgeous lips around the orange and sucked the juice and flesh away from the peel.

  “So we frame Patty, kill the junkie, destroy the evidence and walk away?” I asked slowly.

  “Exactly,” she said with a grin. I could see bits of orange clinging to her teeth.

  She impressed me and irritated me. I loved her and despised her.

  I couldn’t imagine a life without her, but here at the culmination of my stint as the CK, I couldn’t imagine an entire life stretched out without her.

  Only her.

  “Sounds like you’ve done your homework,” I replied and smiled at her before sipping my coffee.

  “It’s all for you, babe,” she said and picked up another orange slice. “I can’t imagine my life without you.”