by Hal Bodner
Billy went in. He turned, but the guy in black was still outside. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked, with a little irritation, “C’mon.”
“Certainly.” And the stranger was inside, pushing Billy backward against the wall and pressing his body tightly against him.
Billy thought his erection would rip right through the denim. The guy’s chest against his was very erotic. And when the guy gently squeezed his dick, Billy thought he would come right then. Billy reached for his zipper and the guy backed away slightly.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s right. You were going to ‘get naked.’”
“You too,” said Billy as he skinned out of his jeans, his stiff cock leaping free.
“Oh, I think not… yet,” commented the stranger glibly.
“What?” exclaimed Billy, instantly angry. “What the fuck...?”
The stranger’s gaze bore into his own. The anger drained from Billy in a flash. He felt strangely tired.
“You,” said the stranger, taking Billy by the shoulders and forcing him to the floor, “are going to lie there.” The dark young man laid Billy down onto his back and stretched his arms over his head. “And not move.”
Billy felt his legs being separated. He remembered tricking with a guy once who’d tied him to the bedposts in a similar position. He didn’t relish the memory.
“In fact, you can’t move.”
Suddenly Billy couldn’t.
“And I,” he continued, “am going to have some fun.”
Billy watched, listlessly, as the stranger removed his own clothing and neatly folded them, placing them in a corner, before standing above him, nude. The guy’s body was better than he’d expected; Billy wanted to reach out and stroke the smooth, creamy skin, but somehow he couldn’t.
He knelt over Billy’s paralyzed body and, with one fingernail, cut deeply into the flesh over Billy’s right thigh, just underneath the groin. Billy felt the brief sting of pain. How could the guy’s nails be so fucking sharp? He drew in a breath to protest.
“Shh-h-h,” said the other softly. “You cannot move unless I tell you. You cannot talk. And you cannot scream.”
This time, the cut started under Billy’s right armpit and ran down across his ribs to the waist. He felt blood welling sluggishly but he made not a sound.
“Ah, such a beautiful boy,” said the young man as he slowly licked Billy’s blood from his finger. “So docile, so easily held.” He leaned forward and looked deeply into Billy’s eyes.
“A lamb to the slaughter.” He smiled for a moment, then the smile became cruel, viciously cruel.
“So easily held that I might modify my earlier instructions.”
Thank God, thought Billy. He’s letting me go!
“Oh no,” was the reply, as if he’d read Billy’s mind. “But I will let you feel,” he cackled. “I’ll let you feel more intensely than you’ve ever felt in your little life.”
The nails flashed across Billy’s stomach. It felt like hot irons were being laid across his skin. His muscles contracted with the pain.
“Wasn’t that delicious?”
Again, this time on the inside of his thigh down to his upper calf. Billy began to sweat.
“And this...” The voice was a hiss.
Slowly, the villain teased Billy’s right nipple with the tip of his nails, reducing it to a bloody pulp. Then he started on the left. Then the thighs again. Then the soft flesh under his arms and along his sides. Billy’s washboard stomach began to resemble a cutting board upon which a chef had sliced a few pounds of raw, bloody beef.
Billy was in agony. Just when he thought he would pass out, the bastard would stop and calmly lick up the dribbles of blood. Within an hour, Billy’s entire body was a bloody mass of sensitized, pulsating nerves.
When the fiend started slicing into Billy’s penis and testicles, he was sure his body was feeling as bad as it was possible to feel. He was wrong.
Baring his horrible fangs so that the helpless young man was sure to see, the monster bent his head toward Billy’s throat. And the pain went on...
CHAPTER FOUR
Clive Anderson was determined to remain calm, unwilling to allow the events of the past few days to ruffle his otherwise placid demeanor and even temper. Wanting badly to throw the nearest breakable object at the farthest wall of his office, he settled instead for heaving a mighty sigh at the unfairness of life. He was surprised at how good it felt. He considered a moment, indulged himself, and sighed again.
Waiting for the forensic report on the latest murder victim, Clive longed for the good old days. For the first time he began to regret the promotion five years ago that had put him in his shortly-to-be-uncomfortable position as Captain of the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station. His instincts told him the citizens of the Creative City had a budding serial killer in their midst.
Clive’s promotion and transfer to West Hollywood were supposed to have been a sinecure—a reward for long years as an efficient and devoted public servant and the beginning of an easy sail toward eventual retirement. Clive had examined the job transfer carefully, hoping his race had had something to do with getting him the promotion, just another step along the department’s road to eliminating discrimination. Though it was tremendously unpopular to even mention skin color any more, especially in the Sheriff’s Department, Clive had grown up in an earlier and more racially volatile age and, secretly, he couldn’t help but wonder. But no, after reflecting on the issue he was forced to admit that he had only his own scrupulous efficiency to thank for placing him in the awkward position of having to deal with the current unpleasantness. Clive sighed again, this time with substantially less satisfaction than before, and wished he were still back in the Valley.
West Hollywood was notoriously free of the more violent crimes and usually a quiet, pleasant town in which to work. Occasionally a car was stolen, summer months brought the usual groups of young gay bashers into town, small scale burglaries were routine, and the partiers on the Sunset Strip brought a certain amount of trouble on the weekends. Other than that, West Hollywood was an anomaly—a small town with a small-town mentality and small-town crime rate, plopped down right in the center of one of the largest metropolises in the world.
Clive felt twin trickles of sweat as they gathered under his arms and began their journey down his sides. He shifted uncomfortably and wondered if he had enough time to change into a fresh shirt before the coroner’s arrival. One thing he hated, more than anything else, was to present a less than pristine appearance to the world. “You are what you wear,” Papa had once told him, and Clive swore by the homily. He was as obsessive with the details of his wardrobe as he was about everything else. So obsessive, in fact, that his neatly folded pocket squares had become not only his trademark, but also something of an inside joke within the higher ranks of the Sheriff’s Department. He grimaced as he considered Becky’s well-known indulgence in anything that was laden with sugar, covered in whipped cream or wrapped in chocolate. Clive was actually very fond of Becky, but given her propensity to leave trails of crumbs and sticky handprints in her wake he abandoned the idea of a clean shirt, attractive though it might be, knowing he would only have to change it once again after she left.
But he wasn’t happy about it. Normally an impeccable dresser, sporting crisp white shirts and handmade Italian suits, Clive disliked perspiration on principle; it served only to mar his carefully maintained, unruffled composure. Already he felt his control quickly slipping away as he thought that, with the discovery of the second body, the annual homicide statistics for West Hollywood had just doubled.
Unlike many of the other people in the Sheriff’s Department, Clive hadn’t chosen a career in law enforcement for any of the usual reasons. As a small boy he’d had no burning desire to rid the world of criminals; he possessed no hidden insecurities manifesting in macho behavior, nor did he achieve satisfaction in holding authority.
Born in Louisiana, the only son of a moderately well-to-do
pediatrician, Clive was at heart a very gentle man. He followed Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolence and it had stood him in good stead time and time again. He’d frequently, in his days as a deputy, been able to disarm and apprehend criminals with quiet logic in situations where his fellow officers would have gone in shooting. He was sometimes amazed he’d ever chosen a career in anything like police work, which when you came right down to it was really a rather militaristic discipline.
Oh, he’d had his choice of careers all right. Papa’d seen to that. He’d studied law for a while but rapidly became uncomfortable with the idea of interpreting precedents and the notion that any fact could be argued in more than one way. It offended his well-ingrained sense of order as well as contradicting another motto of Papa’s that he was fond of quoting: “A place for everything, everything in its place.” Medicine was no better; it had taken him years of police work before he could tolerate the sight of blood. Fortunately, as he advanced within the department, his direct contact with the battered, shot, and stabbed of Los Angeles County had lessened.
No, what appealed to Clive about law enforcement, to the unending amazement of everyone else in the department, was the paperwork. Even with a crime that would remain forever unsolved, he took great personal satisfaction from knowing that each and every report had been carefully filled out and was resting, with all its supporting documentation, in a specific and unique place in the files of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
It was his passion for order and neatness that had gotten him where he was so easily. As a deputy, his careful attention to detail had resulted in quite a few arrests where others had given up. Upon his promotion to detective, his reports had been masterpieces of ordered, logical thought; he even had neat and legible handwriting. His superiors had noticed, and despite his objections that there were others more worthy, he’d received promotion upon promotion, rising through the ranks in record time. Then again, he thought with only a little bitterness, the Fourteenth Amendment had probably helped, at least in the early days.
As he reached his early forties, Clive discovered something else about himself. To his great puzzlement, people seemed to want to like him. With no effort on his part, he was frequently invited to attend exclusive parties hosted by the sheriff himself and he’d lost track of the number of times he’d had dinner at the homes of various mayors of various cities scattered throughout Los Angeles County.
But even now, with fifty looming scant months ahead and the gray hairs cropping up at his temples with increasing frequency, Clive still couldn’t understand this odd attraction he was cursed with. He’d long given up on finding anyone to share his life; he felt his penchant for neatness and order was sure to drive the poor woman crazy. He’d tried living with someone once several years ago; an artist, complete with the artist’s traditional creative temperament and lackadaisical attitude toward maintaining her living quarters. She’d lasted barely six months and since then, he’d restricted himself to short term relationships where neither he nor the woman had any illusions about working toward something more permanent.
Before she left, she’d tried to explain that, though she found his picayune attitude impossible to live with, others found him “comforting.” Since he rarely got upset about anything, she’d told him, people simply assumed that he held all the answers. Clive supposed she had been right. On the rare occasions when he lost his temper, usually when faced with sloppiness or inefficiency, those around him, rather than becoming resentful or defensive, were embarrassed and hurt and responded by striving to do better the next time. In short, for reasons he could never fathom, people enjoyed making Clive happy.
With great patience masking the turmoil he felt, he straightened the blotter on his desk, lining it up so that it was precisely centered. He wondered again when Becky would arrive, checking to make sure he had enough spare handkerchiefs in preparation for the anticipated onslaught she was sure to perpetrate upon his clothing.
Clive waited, examining his desk critically. Ah, there was a pencil that had managed to find its way into his pen jar. He seized the offending writing implement and placed it in the proper spot; he would have gently scolded it had he been one of those people given to speaking to inanimate objects. Sighing again with satisfaction in a job well done, he leaned back in his chair.
His intercom buzzed. “Ms. O’Brien’s here.”
“Send her in, Claire,” he said and, before he could release the intercom button, Becky barged in, clutching a manila file in one hand and something Clive surmised was cherry goo on a stick in the other.
“Well?” he asked.
“There’s a pattern developing,” Becky reported with annoying cheerfulness.
“Great,” said Clive mournfully. “I don’t suppose you could manage to at least try to look a little concerned about it?”
Becky flashed him a dazzling smile and plopped into her usual chair in front of his desk after dropping the file in the center of the blotter. Clive looked at it in distaste, not only for what he feared it was likely to contain, but also due to the undoubtedly tacky fingerprints splayed across its cover.
“It won’t bite, Clive,” Becky said, encouraging him.
“No,” he sighed, “I don’t suppose it will.”
He gingerly opened it using his fingertips and hoping he could avoid skin contact with the sugary residue. Needless to say, his hopes were soon dashed and he resignedly took out the handkerchief to wipe the mess from his fingers.
“The victim was tortured this time,” Becky told him brightly.
Clive looked up hopefully. “Then it’s not the same guy?”
“Unfortunately, it probably is.”
Becky’s cheery smile belayed the somberness of her statement as she shoved the bright red candy into her mouth and continued forming her words around it, not bothering to wipe her chin as the dissolving sugar trickled down.
“There’s not enough blood in the body—again. And there’s the same flap of skin missing from the throat. It’s the same guy all right. Or girl. E.R.A. and all that.”
Clive smiled weakly at the coroner’s feeble jest and turned to examining the first page of the report. “Lacerations again,” he commented. Becky grunted affirmatively in reply.
“Any clues there? It says here they covered the entire front of the body. Not just the...uh...penis.” Clive gulped uncomfortably.
“Kinda gets you guys where ya live, don’t it?” she grinned. “Ty had the same reaction.”
With almost morbid enthusiasm, she continued, “The sides of this guy’s torso were spaghetti, too. But look here.” She stood and came around the desk, pointing with one hand and resting the other on the shoulder of Clive’s clean shirt. He winced at the thought of his dry-cleaning bill.
“Look at the depth. Very shallow. Just like Balencini. Nowhere deep enough to cause the massive blood loss we’re seeing. Except for the one on the throat. Now, that’s deep,” she said with seeming satisfaction, “Almost took the whole head off again.”
She glanced hopefully toward the small refrigerator that Clive kept in one corner of his office. “Did I leave a coffee cake in there the other day?”
“Half,” Clive replied. “A week ago. It went stale so I threw it out.”
“Damn,” Becky’s voice held true regret. “I’ll bet it was a Sara Lee, too, wasn’t it?”
Clive’s attention was caught by the report. “Is this one enough to account for the blood?”
“Huh?” Becky was still looking longingly at the refrigerator.
“The throat laceration,” Clive reminded her.
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” she said wistfully. “But no.” She shook her head. “The spinal cord was severed after he was already dead. When they brought him in, I first thought the cause of death was obvious. Decapitation resulting in massive blood loss, but the blood was already gone.”
“So he was killed somewhere else and the killer dumped the body.”
&n
bsp; “Looks that way.” She paused. “Are you sure you threw it out?”
“I’m sure,” Clive replied patiently. “Could we please get back to business?”
“Yeah,sure.” Becky replied, finally mentally dismissing the lost coffee cake. “I’ve got another one back at the office anyway.”
“What you’re telling me doesn’t make sense,” Clive protested.
Becky looked at him surprised. “Sure it does. They were on sale at Pavilions. I stocked up. If you freeze ’em, they stay fresh. They had two-for-ones on Weight Watchers desserts too. You should stop by for a snack on your way home.”
“I’m talking about the corpse.” Clive’s patience was wearing a little thin. Although he found Becky’s obsession with sweets rather endearing in a mildly eccentric way most of the time, with the autopsy report in front of him, complete with full color photos, he was beginning to feel slightly nauseous.
“We found the clothes in the same place as the body,” he reminded her. “Not a drop of blood on ’em. It takes a long time to do this to a person. Why would the killer move both the body and the clothing?”
“Strange, isn’t it?”
She took the candy from her mouth and used it as a pointer. Clive absently handed her the remaining clean hanky.
“It gets worse. Read on, MacDuff. Next paragraph. This is what really bothers me. I can’t figure out what the killer used to cut with. It doesn’t look like a knife. Didn’t slice quite cleanly enough. The edges are ragged but there’s not enough evidence of sawing or hacking. I’m tempted to say it was done with something flat and dull, but there’d be more tearing of the tissue. If the weapon was, oh, let’s say, a carpet scraper, it would have taken tremendous, concentrated force to make incisions like this. I was hoping a piece of it had broken off in the neck wound, but no luck.”
She returned to her chair and plopped down. “I dunno. Maybe he’s a kitchen-gadget freak and used some kind of uber lemon zester from Williams-Sonoma.” She chuckled at her own joke. “Whatever it was, I sure can’t figure it out.” She rummaged through her huge black bag and a second later triumphantly pulled out a small box of donuts. “Aha!” she exclaimed. “I knew these were around somewhere!”