Head Games (39 page)

Authors: Eileen Dreyer

But she knew how he worked. She knew what to expect, so that maybe she could anticipate it. She had to take the chance.

“Here,” he said. “Pull into the alley.”

Another innocuous house, brick, square, porched, with a boarded-up house across the street and a Volvo parked two doors down. “This isn't your house,” she pointed out unnecessarily.

“Yes, it is,” he said as Molly pulled the car into an open garage and stopped. “I used my army pay for it. Not a bad deal, either. The lady who lived here before had cats. About a hundred of them, I think. You can imagine what it smells like.”

That one took Molly's breath away. They said that the one thing a serial killer was good at, no matter how ineffectual he was otherwise, was his craft. Kenny had deliberately bought a house with a revoltingly pungent odor. Just about the only odor Molly could think of that might mask the ones he was planning to create.

“By the way,” he said before she had the chance to get the door handle and run, “even if you show the police this house, they won't find her either. I promise. I've had five building inspectors in here already, not to mention the police who were asking questions today.”

Okay, so she'd been thinking of running. Just taking a dive to the grass and rolling out of the way of a shot and heading for help. That is, if Molly discounted the fact that bullets ran faster than creaky nurses.

“Open the door.”

She sucked in a breath. She did as she was told, stepping into a clean, well-ordered garage. Kenny popped the seat forward and climbed out behind her, the gun steady, always at her back. Molly looked around, wondering why nobody saw what was happening.

It was then she realized how truly well-thought-out Kenny's venture
was. The house they were about to enter stood directly behind the one the police had raided just that afternoon. Kenny, the trap-door spider, had made sure nobody would stumble over his nest.

Which meant, she had to think with a sinking heart, that Marianne was tucked away someplace beneath the two yards.

“Caves,” she breathed in stupefaction.

He actually chuckled. “I found it when I was ten. Right in between the two houses. Convenient, huh?”

She could get away, Molly thought. She could run for help now and just have them dig.

If she couldn't take out Kenny quickly enough, not only would she be dead, but Marianne, too. And Kenny would simply pack up his things, move to a different town, and leave his evidence, undiscovered, a few feet beneath the yards of South Grand.

“Door's open,” he told her, the gun making impressions on her skin. “Go on in.”

“You just leave the door open?” Molly couldn't help but demand as she climbed the steps to a tidy back porch that held nothing more noticeable than one of those flags people hung by their doors. Kenny's was a bluebird. Cute.

“Nobody really wants to come here unannounced,” he said. “I can hardly get them to stop by if I ask. The cat smell, ya know. It's really tough to get out.”

Molly opened the door and agreed. Her eyes started to water. She tried breathing through her nose. “Doesn't anybody wonder why you live here?” she demanded.

His laugh was quiet and controlled. “I got it for about twenty thousand dollars. Nobody wonders. And they don't think I actually live here yet. I'm a rehabber from the county named Tony.”

“Nobody recognizes you?”

“I look different.”

Molly instinctively nodded as she took in the kitchen. Well-scrubbed blue linoleum floors, old white wood cabinets. Toaster covers and plastic flowers in a pink depressionware glass. All neat and tidy and unexceptional, just as they'd found Dahmer's apartment those times the police had responded. Just as they'd found in Kenny's other house.

And then Molly saw what was sitting on the little dining room table. What Kenny had brought her to discover.

Marianne. Bitchy, impatient Marianne, eyes wide, mouth gaping, dyed blond hair straggling across the dining room table because there was no more left of her than her head and the blood that pooled beneath her severed throat.

Tucked in a bowl on the dining room table like a bloody pile of fruit.

Molly heard herself howling.

She was swinging around even before the sight sunk in. A hand out, a foot, anything to trip him up. To get back out that door and run screaming down the block until somebody heard her.

But Kenny had anticipated it all. Before Molly could get a toe on him, he slammed the gun against the side of her head and took her straight to her knees.

She was shaking her head, struggling to get her limbs back under her, when she felt a sting of a needle at the side of her neck.

“Oh, God” was the last thing she said. The last thing she thought was that she shouldn't have wasted all that time on computer classes. She should have taken martial arts.

And then she just melted to the floor.

CHAPTER 20

Molly was still thinking how stupid she was when she came to. Well, kind of came to. She couldn't seem to coordinate her limbs. She couldn't think or see very clearly. And she thought she was paralyzed, because she couldn't move.

Molly knew it was cold. She knew it smelled worse than even the cats, a smell anybody who worked in a morgue would have recognized in a heartbeat. Her heart slammed into action, and her brain followed a couple lethargic clicks behind.

Thorazine. Molly recognized the cotton candy feel of it, the drug taste in her mouth, the ataxia in her limbs. Stupid thing to be conversant with, but at least Rancho VA had taught her some things. It had also, fortunately, taught her how to function while half-bagged.

Comprehension followed shortly thereafter, such as it was. She'd been dropped with a load of tranquilizer and transported out of the dining room. She was sitting on a chair, her arms behind her, a rope around her wrists and again around her chest. In a cold, dank place that smelled of earth and death.

Great. Another setting for nightmares. Especially after what she'd seen on that dining room table.

She must have groaned again, the closest she could come to that primal scream of rage she'd let loose with upstairs.

“You're here with me now,” Kenny said behind her, his voice dreamy.

Molly tried to turn around, couldn't quite manage it. She wrapped her
tongue around her teeth and attempted to get some feeling into it. She was at least beginning to focus now.

“You killed Marianne,” she accused, seeing again the obscenity on that table.

“Of course I did. What did you expect?”

Please, she thought. Don't give me the damn scorpion on the turtle analogy. It'd be worse than finding my own head on the dining room table.

Molly had no more than completed the thought when it finally sank in just what her surroundings looked like. And finally the urge to laugh proved too strong.

“What's so funny?” Kenny demanded.

Molly just shook her head, wondering if it was possible for a heart to just fall out and flop around on the floor. Hers sure felt like it was. But she couldn't help it. She'd just awakened in the biggest clichÃ© in the world.

What is this
, she wanted to ask,
shock theater
? Kenny had fashioned the cave straight out of a cheap B movie thriller, the kind where the set decorator had obviously been inspired by the more lurid Dahmer stories. But Molly had seen the Dahmer crime-scene photos. She knew that the blue Dahmer vats where he'd soaked the flesh off those bones hadn't been underground in a basement cut out of a low-ceilinged cave. His workshop had all been tucked into that tidy apartment right along with his Sears artwork and television. Didn't Kenny get it? It was much scarier that way.

Which was why she was so sweaty and sick, she was sure.

Of course, the fact that he'd put his workroom in a cave didn't help. Kenny hadn't even thought to whitewash the walls or install grow lights so he could pretend it wasn't a cave after all. He didn't bother to do anything to wipe out the terror that seeped from the earthen walls. Molly was sure she was going to vomit, and she hadn't ever gotten around to eating anything.

But then, she figured she had a right. After all, it wasn't every day a person got to see someone she knew staring at her from the top of a dining room table without benefit of so much as a neck. It was almost right up there with rolling in the dust with one.

Oh, God, Marianne. I'm sorry
.

Sorry for another one. Sorry for everyone.

“You've been doing your research on Jeff Dahmer, haven't you?” she asked, struggling for coherence.

Kenny didn't seem particularly put out. “I wrote to him in prison.”

“Of course you did.”

“You don't understand.”

On which level? she wanted to ask. On the “I just want somebody to notice me” level? Sure, she understood. She'd gone to Vietnam on the strength of that particular sentiment. She'd spent her entire life doing what people thought was appropriate so her parents would finally say they were at least aware of her. Hell, wanting to be noticed fueled more good and evil in the world than sex, no matter what Freud said.

But killing people and chopping them up so they'd notice?

“I'm trying,” she said.

This time Kenny laughed. “No, you're not. If you'd tried you wouldn't have betrayed me.”

“Like your mom betrayed you?”

“Too late to play party games, Miss Burke. That's been tried before.”

Yeah, Molly bet it had. The problem was, if she didn't find the right party game, she wasn't getting out of this basement except in a vat.

She wanted to laugh again. This was the point in the movie where the heroine wormed all the details of the crime out of the bad guy, since he thought she was going to die anyway.

Oh, what the hell? She had to try something to stall until she could think better. Until she could at least move.

“It's a pretty sophisticated setup you have here,” she tried.

Unlike the movies, though, real serial killers didn't feel the need to confess. “I think you need more sedative,” he mused.

Molly tested the knots at her wrists to find them competent. Her legs were free, which made her believe that Kenny intended to keep working from behind. It only made sense, after all. The point of this exercise was to get the woman under perfect control. Make her what you want, which meant stay as far away from the real her as you could. If Kenny was doing Dahmer time, he'd get Molly at least to the point of total paralysis, if not death, before playing his real reindeer games. That way she could be his friend completely by his ground rules.

How the hell was she going to prevent that?

Molly took another look around the cave that seemed even closer, even darker and more sinister. It seemed she could hear old screams, hopeless cries for help that never came. Every image she'd ever held while walking a crime scene, all packed into this little cave like rancid meat in a can.

A place of extremity, she thought as she listened to the clink and ring of metal beyond her head as Kenny set up his tools. A hell the likes of which she couldn't even have imagined in her worst nightmares. And all born of a small boy's need to be seen.

It must have been the effect of the Thorazine, she thought, because all she could feel was sad.

“It'll be soon, now, Miss Burke,” he said. “You're going to be part of me, you know.”

Yeah, she thought, squeezing her eyes shut to keep from doing something stupid. Stomach contents.

She was not going to end up on a table. That was all there was to it. She just had to figure out how.

And then came the most awful sound she'd ever thought to hear in her life. Molly almost passed out. Half a foot from her head, Kenny was testing a power drill.

“You don't need to stuff anything in my head to make me your friend,” she said, wishing she could keep her voice from rising.

The sound stopped. It was like sitting in a dentist's chair and hearing that high-pitched whine stop and knowing you were only getting a reprieve. One more round of that and she'd wet the chair.

“That's what I thought,” he said. “I really did. But I'm afraid I just don't believe that anymore.”

Get your feet under you, Molly thought, trying to make them work in tandem. Pitch the chair backward. Somersault right through his instrument tray.

“You never gave me a chance to explain,” she insisted as her feet slid along the floor.

A silence. She could almost hear him think. She could smell the rising anticipation on his skin. She'd never forget that smell. Not if she lived to be a hundred. She'd do a paper on that smell. A symposium. Molly Burke standing up in front of the FBI Academy with graphs and charts and pointers
defining that smell.
Mark it well, ladies and gentlemen. It's the last thing a victim is going to notice before her skull gets aerated.

“It's not going to change anything,” Kenny said.

“Maybe it will,” she offered. “You've practiced this a thousand times even before you did it the first time. And I bet it's never enough, is it?”

Silence. Molly squeezed her eyes shut for a second, praying for inspiration. Then she faced the shadowed steps that seemed to lead nowhere and saw what was tucked along the walls on either side. Altars. Altars decorated in bones. Jars full of floating, watching eyes.

She closed her own eyes again. “If we could talk a little more about what it is you dream about â¦ what you want. Maybe I can help make it right. Maybe I can explain why I did what I did. I didn't betray you, Kenny. I swear I didn't. Can't we talk about it?”

Silence. The deathly sibilance of an indrawn breath. “Not anymore.”

Molly drew her own breath to argue. To plead. Jesus, she'd weep if he wanted her to, just to distract him enough that she could get a chance to slam back into him.

She didn't get the chance.

She felt the rush of air first. A river of cat piss sinking into the stench of death. Another smell she'd do nightmare time over.

Kenny heard it, too. Molly heard him catch his breath, lift something off whatever was behind her.

She did her best to focus on the stairs, praying.

“Of course it'll help,” she said, just a little more loudly. Announcing her presence to anyone who might be there.

Maybe Sasha had seen after all. Maybe she'd alerted the cavalry. The Mounties. The fucking Marines. Whoever it was, Molly meant to help them all she could.

“It's just been so long since I'd seen you, Kenny,” she said, a little louder. “I wasn't expecting you to turn up in my life.”

He slid something very sharp along the side of her neck. “Be quiet.”

Molly was quiet. She tensed every muscle in her legs and back, ready to spring at an instant. She kept her eyes on the edge of the basement. She prayed for a uniform. A voice of authority.

There was no uniform. What she saw instead were Bruno Maglis, and Molly's brain froze.

“No, Patrick!” she screamed, straining against the ropes. “Get out of here! Go get help!”

But Patrick didn't get out. He kept walking right down those perfectly carved steps.

Stupid idiot, Molly thought, truly sobbing now, struggling against the ropes even with that damn knife slicing into her neck. What the hell good was he going to do against a serial killer? What kind of penance was he thinking of paying?

But he kept coming. He reached the bottom of the steps and stooped beneath the low ceiling.

“Patrick, please,” she begged. “Run!”

Kenny lifted the knife away. “Hello, Patrick.”

“Hi, Kenny,” he said with a slow smile. “Am I in time?”

And instead of running to help her, Patrick simply shucked his coat and sat down.