Dark Passions (30 page)

Read Dark Passions Online

Authors: Jeff Gelb

She never managed to get her panties off. Kneeling, he grabbed her legs and laid each over a chair arm. The sodden piece of material between them cut into her, heightening the pleasure-pain. All it took was a quick tug, and they literally gave up the ghost.
“Oh God ... scoot forward ... that's right. Oh yeah. Oh baby.”
He slipped two fingers into her cunt as far as they would go, pulled them out, and shoved them back in. Jeannie bit her bottom lip to keep from crying out in pleasure.
“You like that, don't you? Oh yeah, you
like
that. I know what you like.... I know what you need.”
His fingers moved faster, in and out and in and out, and he laughed softly when Jeannie's body tightened around them. Her clit was diamond hard.
“Hold on, baby ... let it rise ... c'mon ... just hold on. Are you close? Ready?”
Jeannie gripped his arms and arched her back, grinding her cunt against his hand.
“Now ... NOW!”
He pulled his fingers out, and her body spasmed—the orgasm imploding on itself one second only to reverse direction an instant later when he drove his cock into her up to the hilt. His shoulder, hidden beneath its crocodile-embroidered polo shirt, muffled Jeannie's scream of ecstasy.
“Relax, baby, I'm just getting started.”
Lungs heaving, hips bucking, hands clawing, they finished simultaneously. He got up first, excusing himself as he went into the office's adjoining bathroom to clean up and give her time to dress.
When he returned, face washed, hair slicked back, she was still in the chair, legs spread, naked.
“Uh, shouldn't you be ...” He pointed to the shift on the floor.
Jeannie's smile trembled for a moment. “You—you taste good. Can I have some more, please?”
He straightened the polo shirt's collar.
“I, um, don't think I'd be able to ... right now.”
Jeannie lowered her legs, pouting just a little because men told her it was cute.
“Okay, we can do that later. I have nothing planned for tonight and—”
“Can't. I have ... plans for tonight.”
“Plans?”
He walked to a desk that was smaller than Dr. Drake's. On it was a framed photo that Jeannie hadn't noticed when she first walked in. The woman in the photo was lovely, not beautiful. She wasn't perfect.
“Oh. Your wife?”
He followed her gaze. “Just a girlfriend.”
Just.
“So, how was the test drive, Dr. Margrove?”
“It wasn't like that.”
“Of course not.” She slipped the dress on over her head and tied the shoulder straps without looking at him. “Could you do me a favor, at least?”
“If I can.”
“Will you convince Dr. Drake to perform surgery?”
“No. You don't need surgery, Jeannie ... you need therapy.”
“I'm not cra—” She stopped. It would be
crazy
to try and convince him of that. “Is there a ladies' room on this floor?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “You can use this one.”
“I'd rather not, thanks. Is there?”
Standing, he pulled a key attached to a neon-pink rectangle of plastic on which the words “WOMEN—THIRD FLOOR” were inscribed and set it on the edge of the desk closest to her.
“End of the hall, to the right. You can just leave the key there. I'll have Maintenance get it in the morning. And take this.”
Jeannie took the business card. There was another doctor's name on it ... in a building across town.
“I think you might feel better about yourself if you did talk to a therapist, and she's one of the best. Does a lot of work with teenage girls. Eating disorders, self-image issues, that sort of thing. Make an appointment.”
She didn't thank him or say good-bye.
Jeannie made her way to the last door on the right in silence.
She'd been in enough offices to know that the windows therein are only for show. Not so with windows in public restrooms. The one in the WOMEN—THIRD FLOOR was small, but after removing a rusted bent nail that acted as the security precaution, opened all the way. The view from the window was of another corporate-owned building, the windows facing her shut and empty ... possibly more bathrooms. Below, three stories down, was a narrow courtyard that had been converted into a miniature green space. There were a few benches, a trash can or two, a man sitting on one of the concrete benches, smoking, talking on a cell phone.
It was perfect.
Three stories wasn't high. People and animals and even small children survive falls from that height without major damage. And the man on the bench would be able to call an ambulance.
In the last moment, before she pitched forward, Jeannie caught her reflection in the mirror over the sink and smiled. Her body was tense, frightened. She blew it a kiss.
“It's not you... . It's
me.
”
 
 
“Ms. Wallace? Can you hear me? It's Dr. Drake. Ms. Wallace? Listen. You're in the hospital, but you're all right. You have some broken ribs and a slight concussion, but you'll be fine.”
Jeannie forced her eyes open and immediately closed them. The room was filled with dazzling white light. It hurt. Her eyes hurt. Her face hurt. Her body ached.
Good.
“H-how ... am I?”
She felt the bed shift slightly as he leaned forward.
“The doctors on your case can tell you more, but I can say that they expect a complete recovery. Internally.”
Without opening her eyes, Jeannie lifted her hand—she could feel a bandage—toward her face. Another hand stopped it and returned it to the thin hospital mattress.
“You've suffered massive trauma to your face, and that's why I'm here. I spoke to Ben Margrove, and he said you seemed a bit troubled when you left him, but I can't help to think that this was nothing more than a horrible accident. Was it?”
Jeannie forced her eyes open. Only one seemed to work.
“My face?”
“I'll do the best I can, but ... I'm afraid the damage was extensive.”
“Will there be ... scars?”
His owl-eyes darkened. “I'm afraid there may be some.”
Jeannie smiled at him through the misty anesthetic haze and felt something tear open on her cheek. “Perfect.”
Son of Beast
Graham Masterton
 
 
 
H
elen dropped her pink toweling bathrobe onto the floor and was just about to step into the shower when her cell phone played “I Say A Little Prayer.”
She said, “Shit.” She was tired and aching after sitting in her car all night on the corner of Grear Aly, waiting for a rape suspect who had never appeared. But the tune played over and over, and she knew that the caller wasn't going to leave her alone until she answered. She picked up the cell phone from the top of the laundry basket and said, wearily, “Foxley.”
“Did I wake you?” asked Klaus.
“Wake me? I haven't even managed to crawl into bed yet.”
“Sorry, but Melville wants you down here ASAP. Hausman's All-Day Diner on East Eighth Street. It looks like Son of Beast has been at it again.”
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah. My feelings exactly.”
She parked her metallic red Pontiac Sunfire on the opposite side of East Eighth Street and crossed the road through the whirling snow. It was bitterly cold, and she wished that she had remembered her gloves. As she approached the diner, she shook down the hood of her dark blue duffel coat so that the two cops in the doorway could see who she was.
Klaus Geiger was already there, talking to the owner. Klaus was big and wide-shouldered, so that he looked like a linebacker for the Bengals rather than a detective. His dirty-blond hair was all mussed up, and there were plum-colored circles under his eyes.
“You look like you haven't slept either,” said Helen.
“I didn't. Greta's cutting two new teeth.”
“The joys of parenthood, right?”
Klaus turned to the owner and said, “Mr. Hausman, this is Detective Foxley from the Personal Crimes Unit. Mr. Hausman came to open up this morning about a quarter of six and found the back door had been forced.”
The owner took off his eyeglasses and rubbed them with a crumpled paper napkin. He was balding, mid-fifties, with skin the color of liverwurst and a large mole on the left side of his chin. “I don't know how anybody could do a thing like that. It's like killing two people both at once. It's terrible.”
Without a word, Helen went over to the young woman's body. She was lying on her back with her head between two bar stools. Her black woollen dress had been dragged right up to her armpits, and although she was still wearing a lacy black bra, her panties were missing. Her head had been wrapped around with several layers of cling film, so that her eyes stared out like a koi carp just beneath the surface of a frozen pond.
Like all of the nine previous victims, she was heavily pregnant—seven or eight months. A photographer was taking pictures of her from every angle, while a crime-scene specialist in a white Tyvek suit was kneeling down beside her. He almost looked as if he were praying, but he was using a cotton-bud to take fluid samples.
The intermittent flashing of the camera made the young woman's body appear to jump, as if she were still alive. Helen bent over her. As far as she could tell without unwrapping her head, she was young and quite pretty, with freckles and short brunette hair.
“Do we know who she was?” asked Helen.
“Karen Marie Dozier,” Klaus told her. “Age twenty-four. Her library card gives her address as Indian Hills Avenue, St. Bernard.”
There was no need to ask if the young woman had been sexually assaulted. There were purple finger bruises all over her thighs, and her swollen vagina was overflowing with blood-streaked semen.
Klaus said, “Same MO as all the others. And the same damn calling card.”
He held up a plastic evidence envelope. Inside was a ticket for Son of Beast, the huge wooden roller-coaster at Kings Island amusement park, over two hundred feet high and seven thousand feet long, with passenger cars that traveled at nearly eighty miles an hour. Helen had tried it only once, and she had felt as sick to her stomach as she did this morning.
 
 
“That's nine,” said Lieutenant Colonel Melville. “Nine pregnant women raped and suffocated in sixteen months.
Nine.
”
He paused, and he was breathing so furiously that he was whistling through his left nostril.
“The perpetrator has left us dozens of finger impressions. He's so damn lavish with his DNA that we could clone the bastard, if we had the technology. He always leaves a ticket for the roller-coaster ride. Yet we don't have a motive, we don't have a single credible witness, and we don't have a single constructive lead.”
He held up a copy of the
Cincinnati Enquirer
with the banner headline,
NINTH MOM
-TO-
BE MURDER
:
COPS STILL CLUELESS
.
Lieutenant Colonel Melville was short and thickset with prickly white hair and a head that looked as if it were on the point of explosion even when he was calm. Today he was so frustrated and angry that all he could do was twist the newspaper like a chicken's neck.
“This guy is making us look like assholes. Not only that, no pregnant woman can feel safe in this city, and that's an ongoing humiliation for this investigations bureau and for the Cincinnati Police Department as a whole.”
“Maybe we could try another decoy,” suggested Klaus. He was referring to three efforts they had made during the summer to lure Son of Beast into the open by having a policewoman walk through downtown late in the evening wearing a prosthetic “bump.”
Helen shook her head. “It didn't work before, and I don't think it's going to work now. Somehow, Son of Beast has a way of distinguishing a genuinely pregnant woman from a fake.”
“So how the hell does he do that?” asked Detective Rylance. “Do you think he's maybe a gynecologist?”
Klaus said, “Maybe he's a gynecologist who was reported by one of his patients for malpractice and wants to take his revenge on pregnant women in general.”
“I don't think so,” said Helen. “Not even a gynecologist could have told that those decoys weren't really pregnant, not without going right up to them and physically squeezing their stomachs. But if Son of Beast knows for sure which women are pregnant and which ones aren't, maybe he has access to medical records.”
“Only two of the victims attended the same maternity clinic,” Klaus reminded her. “It wouldn't have been easy for him to access the medical records of seven different clinics—three of which were private, remember, and one of which was in Covington.”
“Not easy, agreed. But not impossible.”
“Okay, not impossible. But we still don't have a motive.”
Helen picked up her Styrofoam cup of latte, but it had gone cold now, and there was wrinkly skin on top of it. “Maybe we should be asking ourselves why he always leaves a Son of Beast ticket behind.”
“He's taunting us,” said Detective Rylance. “He's saying, here I am, I'm going to take you on the scariest roller-coaster ride you've ever experienced. I'm going to fling you this way and that. You're helpless.”
“I'm not sure I agree with you,” said Helen. “I think there could be more to it than that.”
“Well, look into it, Detective,” said Lieutenant Colonel Melville. “And—Geiger—you go back to every one of those maternity clinics and double-check everybody who has access to their records. I want some real brainstorming from all of you. I want fresh angles. I want fresh evidence. I want you to find me some witnesses who actually saw something. I want this son of a bitch hunted down and nailed to the floor by his balls.”
 
 
Helen went back to her apartment at three-thirty that afternoon, undressed, showered, and threw herself into bed. It was dark outside, and the snow was falling across Walnut Street thicker than ever, muffling the sound of traffic, but she still couldn't sleep. She kept thinking of Karen Dozier staring up at her through all those layers of cling film the way she must have stared up at the man who was raping her.
She thought she heard a child crying out and the slow clanking of a roller-coaster car as it was cranked up to the top of the very first summit. But the child's cry was only the yowling of a cat, and the clanking noise was only the elevator at the other end of the hallway.
She switched on her bedside lamp. It was 7:35
PM
. For the first time, in a long time, she missed having Tony lying beside her. They had split up at the end of September, for all kinds of reasons, mostly the antisocial hours she had to work and her reluctance to make love after she had witnessed some particularly vicious sex crime. She had found it almost impossible to feel aroused when she had spent the day comforting a ten-year-old boy whose scrotum had been burned by cigarettes, or a seventeen-year-old girl who had been forcibly sodomized with a wine bottle.
She went into the kitchen and switched on the kettle to make a cup of herbal tea. In the darkness of the window, she saw herself reflected, a slim young woman of thirty-one years and seven months, with scruffy, short-cropped hair and a kind of pale, watery prettiness that always deceived men into thinking that she was helpless and weak. She decided that she needed some new nightwear. The white knee-length Sleep T that she was wearing made her look like a mental patient.
The kettle started to whistle piercingly. At the same time, her phone began to play “I Say A Little Prayer.” She took off the kettle, picked up the phone and said, “Foxley.”
“I didn't wake you, did I?” said Klaus.
“What's this? Déjà vu all over again? No, you didn't wake me. I'm way too tired to sleep.”
“I've just had some old guy walk in from the street, says he can help us with You-Know-Who.”
“You have him with you now?” She had picked up on the fact that Klaus had deliberately refrained from saying “Son of Beast.” The investigations bureau had never released the information that the Moms-To-Be Murderer had left roller-coaster tickets at every crime scene, nor what they called him.
“Sure. He's still here. He says he needs to speak to you personally.”
“
Me?
Why does he need to talk to me?”
“He says you're the only person who can do it.”
“I don't understand. The only person who can do
what?
”
“He won't give me any specific details. Look”—he lowered his voice—“he's probably a screwball. But we're really clutching at straws, right, and if he can give us any kind of a lead—”
Helen tugged at her hair. Her reflection in the kitchen window tugged at
her
hair too, although Helen thought that her reflection did it more hesitantly than she did. “Okay,” she said. “I'll be crosstown in twenty minutes. Buy your screwball a cup of coffee or something. Keep him talking.”
 
 
She drove across to Cincinnati Police headquarters on Ezzard Charles Drive with her windshield wipers flapping to clear the snow. Klaus was on the fourth floor, sitting on the edge of his desk and talking to an elderly man in a very long black overcoat. The man had a shock of wiry gray hair and rimless eyeglasses. His face was criss-crossed with thousands of wrinkles, like very soft leather that has been folded and refolded countless times. An old-fashioned black homburg hat was resting in his lap, and his hands, in black leather gloves, were neatly folded on top of it.
Klaus stood up as Helen came into the office. “This is Detective Foxley, sir. Foxley, this is Mr.—”
“Hochheimer,” said the elderly man, rising to his feet and taking off his right glove. “Joachim Hochheimer. I read about the murder of the pregnant woman in the
Post
this evening.”
Helen didn't take off her coat. “And you think you can help us in some way?”
“I think it's possible. But as I have already said to your associate here, it will require a considerable sacrifice.”

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