Sin Eater (25 page)

He was shown into a conference room, and he nodded to his colleagues from another radio station and the local newspaper. He set up his microphone, got his equipment running, and then sat to wait like the rest of them. His fingers were drumming on the table top. Okay, maybe a bit of the nerves were still hanging around after all.

That’s just to keep you sharp, buddy.

He jumped, but thankfully the door opened to admit a video journalist from the television station. She was cute with long legs plugged into a short skirt, blonde, and she gave everyone a neon-white smile as she went around setting up her gear. Jasper was wondering when she’d started at the station when the voice came back.

Forget her for just a moment, please. And pay attention.

He looked around at the others in the room, but they weren’t hearing Essum’s voice bouncing around in his head. And Jasper couldn’t see that bastard either, so obviously Essum was pulling a “voice in my head” act on him.

Very good, you’re a clever one. That’s why you were hand-selected. Now once you’re done here, meet Charlie and me at 44692, 24
th
Avenue North. Come around the back. We’ll be waiting.

Jasper frowned and opened his mouth to respond.

In your head, moron. Just think your answer back at me.

Jasper furrowed up his brow
and gave it his best shot.
I’m at work here. If I don’t go back and file this story people are going to be looking for me.

He could hear Essum’s disappointment in his head.
File the story and meet us after that, then. I’m not going to wait all fucking night.

That’s a 20-minute drive for fuck’s sake –
Jasper stopped, realizing Essum was gone, like someone had switched off the radio.

Constable Trevor Vance entered the room right at that moment, and they all sat up straighter. There was a crescendo of whining and whirring equipment as everyone got their electr
onic devices up and running as Vance took a seat in front of all the microphones on the table. He flipped open a folder, cleared his throat and began to read.

“I’d like to thank you all for coming, and as always, we appreciate the media’s help in finding missing persons, persons of interest, or in this case, escaped suspects. At approximately 10:15 last evening Charles Goodwin escaped from his holding cell here in the basement of the 12
th
Precinct …”

Jasper’s panic flared up again, knowing that a picture of Charles was going to be dispersed to everyone in the room. He also knew there might be video surveillance. Surely Essum realized that, maybe he had some kind of voodoo trick up his sleeve to prevent the video from being seen. That would be pretty fucking handy.

“Video surveillance tapes seem to have been tampered with as well, as at the approximate time of the escape the cameras seem to have encountered electric interference. All we have is a photograph of Charles Goodwin, a mug shot taken the second time we took him into custody. It will be made available to all media outlets that request it. I will now answer a few questions.”

The newspaper guy was the first one to pipe up. “Can you give us any details on how this guy has escaped from custody twice now?”

“Internal investigations are ongoing, and because of that I can offer no further comment on how it was able to happen. Yes?” He pointed to the new cutie pie from the television station, who had her hand politely raised.

“Is it true Charles Goodwin was able to get
into a female police officer’s apartment and attack her the last time he was arrested?”

Jasper was surprised at the question. He hadn’t heard about that.

“Following the previous arrest the additional charges he faced were assaulting a police officer and breaking and entering, yes. That’s all I will disclose on that subject.”

Jasper put up his hand, and Constable Vance acknowledged it with a nod. “Constable Vance, is Charles
Goodwin to be considered dangerous?”

“He is certainly dangerous, we have DNA proof that he has killed two women at this point. We are going back through unsolved cases and looking for DNA evidence to connect him to those. These are violent crimes, so yes, he is dangerous. But we do not consider him to be armed. Still, people are urged not to contact him, but to call the police instead.”

Unarmed
, Jasper thought with a laugh.
Having the fucking left-hand of Satan taking care of you
should
count as being “armed.”

Voro followed a tall man in a mighty fine Tom Ford suit out
to a strip mall parking lot, pleased as punch when the guy put his briefcase on the roof of his car to get his keys out. Voro passed behind the man, his elbow briefly making contact with the man’s back through his jacket. And there it was … not a big sin. Not layer upon layer of evil. Just a drop in the bucket, really.

The man had raped his roommate’s girlfriend in college. He’d been slightly drunk at the time, and so had she, no charges had been laid, the girlfriend hadn’t even told his roommate about it. But that girl hadn’t been right after that. She’d tried to kill herself the next semester as a matter of fact.

The guy didn’t feel bad about it, thought she’d been asking for it, even though he’d hit her in the face a few times to get her to quiet down. He hadn’t done anything like that since … but Voro also saw that deep down under the layers of old-school macho bullshit the guy knew it
had
been wrong, and the only thing keeping him from doing it again was the paralyzing fear of getting caught.

He’d liked it plenty, and still thought about it when he jerked off.

With Essum’s touch that sin was gone, replaced with a warm sensation of well-being. The guy didn’t even question it. He found his car key, got in the car with his briefcase, smiling like an ass the whole time. He didn’t even look to see who had run into him.

Voro felt a surge of strength come back. Raphael had been right. Slacking off on work had been sapping the strength out of him. And he’d need much more
than just this if he was going to nip Essum’s plan in the bud.

He continued his walk down Stark Street, people hurrying past him, on the hunt for a weeknight meal somewhere other than at home. Most of them were assholes, but not real sinners.

He continued his stroll, knowing it was just a matter of time before he found someone really worth relieving of their mortal wrongdoings. And sure enough, the world tilted back to its natural order.

There was a whore on a corner three blocks from the man in the parking lot. She was smoking a cigarette, boldly working the street with all the aplomb of a time-tested pro that didn’t give a shit if she spent the night on her knees or in a cell in lock-up. Getting arrested was preferable to her, she was tired today. She had a scrape on her cheek, and she was acting as though she was
a bit scared to be out working, too. Man, she
really
wanted to get picked up by the fuzz tonight.

Plus her blood and body were polluted with many different narcotics, heroin being the most obvious one that he could smell. The only other smell coming from her was rotten eggs.

Sulfur. Bingo.

He closed his eyes as he passed behind her and caught the hidden memories of her initiation
into the trade she was currently employed in. Her first pimp had found her at sixteen. Gotten her into meth right off the bat. It was easy manipulation beyond that. She would do anything to get that high, and as long as she was high, anything could be happening to her. She couldn’t give half a shit who she was under.

And she’d helped this pimp in many ways because she thought he loved her. But that was the surface excuse … the Sin Eater in him knew that she was attracted to his cruelty. She’d helped him rape and kill the other girls when they skimmed cash from his cut, or if they’d stolen from his stash. She’d lured them places, held them down while he attacked them cruelly, helped him hide the bodies, and then had sex with him after because the whole time the act had turned her on. The fact that she would turn on her own “sisters” was
a testament to the evil that had grabbed on deep to her.

She was one hell of a degenerate. She’d be like seven triple-espressos and a hell of a lot of ephedrine in his gas tank.
Perfect
.

He made her turn around with just a nudge from his brain, and when she did, he held out a one hundred dollar bill to her. Her eyes widened and her coconut turned
into a frightfully good calculator as she was measuring how much H that bill would get her. Good at math and yet here she stood, waiting for a dick to suck.

Her hand snatched the cash, and yet she didn’t run away with it. Her eyes were going over his suit and his body, and she was willing to perform the job even though the cash was now in hand.

It’s not really a curse to be this desired,
Voro thought. But what he said was, “Where?”

“Well, this hotel rents by the hour. Are you paying or me?”

“I’ll pay it,” he offered, and she sauntered by him with hips shifting and legs strutting. Didn’t she know that whores didn’t have to really
sell
the goods? As long as the guy knows you’re a sure thing, there’s no further advertising needed. You’ve got him.

She led him through the “lobby” to the desk. He rented a room for two hours, the whole time feeling her eyes running over him like he was not only a meal ticket but also a walking vibrator. She actually
wanted
him.

He could almost gag, but he told himself that’s what happens when he slacks off. He was no longer used to the stench.

The elevator didn’t work, so she took the stairs up ahead of him, doing the hip-shake thing the entire way. Her skirt was short and her underwear was missing, so he got the whole eyeful. Thankfully, he had no physical reaction to it. Getting an erection because of this would have embarrassed him.

She leaned on his arm as he worked the key
into the lock, fighting to get it open. The heroin in her system was very pure, she barely knew what was going on around her. She also had diseases … she needed an entire pharmacy and priest to deliver last rites, not another hit of H.

Okay, the last bit was a bit blasphemous on his part. But whatever. He knew that once he got in her disease and drug-addled mind, she likely wouldn’t recover from what he was there to really do to her.

In the room she flicked the lights on, went to the bed, hiked up her skirt and bent over, hands planted on the mattress. He shut the door, feeling his skin crawl. She was positively putrid compared to where he’d spent the last few nights. But then he cleared Claudia from his mind, not wanting to get any of this filth splashed on his memory of her.

He walked up behind her, putting a hand on her lower back where he was still technically protected by her skirt. But it didn’t matter, this was enough contact to do what he had to.

She tried to back up into him, and he kept good three steps between them. This was a nice suit after all, and without Portia’s cash it was going to be pretty labour-intensive to get another one like it.

“Hey,” the woman whined around her gum, already wearing on his nerves. “Get to it, honey. I want
my
full two hours’ worth.” Then she tried to grind into him again.

That was supposed to make him amorous?

He wanted to tell her to put her skirt back down, but he wanted out of this room more. So he went right to it, pushing his way into her frontal lobes as deep as he could, meeting absolutely no resistance whatsoever.

The smell was awful. Her mind was worse.

She’d beaten up her sister as a kid. Okay, that wasn’t a sin. But drowning her sister in the paddling pool was. This woman had been raped by her father when she was young, and when he’d started in on her sister she’d gone into a jealous fit she was entirely too young to understand. And she’d drowned her. That was one down.

It had been ruled an accident. Overwhelming joy at having gotten away with it. Then running away when her mother found out about the sexual abuse. She’d been trying to put her daughter in therapy, and that’s why she had bolted.

First night on the street she’d been beaten up by two other whores, then raped by their pimp. She got hers back though, once the pimp decided she would work for him. She had helped him kill the two bullies and dispose of the bodies. She’d had sex with the pimp, on the floor next to their corpses first.

She liked that shit. She lived for it.

Two more sins down. She was beyond filthy; there was a lot more to come.

He heard her whimper, because she was also seeing what she had done, without her own emotions tied in. She was seeing it from
his
point of view, seeing it as wrong for the first time. Her knees gave out and she sunk to the floor, breaking contact.

It was too late. He was in, and he flipped through her nasty little dossier like he could be considering her for a job. Her brain was misfiring like crazy, all the drugs doing nothing to help her recover from being gone over like this. The damage done was irreparable, and when he left this room she would likely die. Last rites indeed.

More murders, more bodies dumped. More turning on her own kind for the lust she had for a monster. Voro would have loved to have found this pimp.
He
would have been one hell of a sin supply. But he was getting the feeling the guy might be dead. This woman was saddened by the thought of him …

Hello
. Oh, so she’d killed him. In the end she had taken
him
out. Interesting, and very enterprising of her. She’d spiked his heroin. Nice. Again, that nasty jealousy of hers.

Voro was glad to note he felt no pity for her, or remorse for what she was remembering. And when he got to an episode just the night before where she’d been taken violently by force, he felt no compassion. Even with the money exchanging hands.

Until there was a weird … hiccup in the video feed. Like a poorly-placed splice that had her faceless john cutting her throat. It wasn’t happening, but she saw it and it made her freeze in terror, then
and
now. Once the guy was gone the image was gone, and she hadn’t remembered it.

She did now. She was crying.

He frowned and tried to flip back but the tunnel he’d burrowed was a mess of dislodged prayers she was thinking to herself and weird memories of playing with puppies and her mother making birthday cakes. She was fried.

But
those scenes were still at least part of her. That image she’d had of a knife coming away from her neck, covered in blood … that hadn’t been real. Someone crudely put it there.

It was a lot like what Sin Eaters did, actually.

As he mentally let go of her, she slumped right over on to the floor. He left her to her whimpering and sobbing. She was trying to piece together happier memories from the good stuff she’d seen. There wasn’t a lot and it was on a continuous loop.

Voro wished like hell she’d seen who she’d been with, but she hadn’t even checked out his face. She had apparently only held on to the promise of that fifty bucks. Everything else had been periphery.

He turned and left the room, locking the door behind him. He could feel her dying and had to get away, just in case someone came to collect her while looking for him at the same time. Collect her as in her soul, of course. Not the body. That would be there for … at least another hour and a half.

The further he got from that room the better he felt, and not just because of the
smell. His batteries were almost entirely charged, she’d done him a world of good. At just a hundred bucks she was a bargain.

He left the hotel, noting that the clerk didn’t even look up. Yeah, that guy had been working here for a while. He had one hell of a porn fetish, and had a few rooms wired up with cameras to sell a few videos online of his own making. He quality-controlled which girls went to those rooms, though. The one Voro had taken upstairs never would have made that cut.

Despicable: yes. Sinner: no.

He was back on Stark
and walking east. A few more like that and he might just be ready to take out Essum and that damn
decipio
, if he ever found out who it was.

Claudia checked the room before letting the motel desk clerk leave. Under the bed: clear. Bathroom: clear
and
clean. No noticeable tampering with any of the vents, mirrors, light fixtures … this wasn’t a complete dive she was checking into, but you can never be sure. She nodded her agreement and the clerk shut the door for her. She didn’t care if he thought she was nuts.

It
had
to be a motel; she needed a window and a door that opened to the outside. She couldn’t explain why that was, it just felt safer to her. The motel door also had a security chain, which she would take over an electronic key card any day.

She put her suitcase on the rack, not opening it, and moved to the windows to shut the blinds. She could see the entire parking lot from up here on the third level, and the room was in a corner of the building so she could see both corridors leading up to her door.

It was also furthest from the damn ice machine.

She picked up her cell phone and called Vance. She got his voicemail right away, so she said briefly, “It’s me. I’m checked in and safe. Call me if you need anything.” Then she hung up and tossed the phone back on the bed.

Okay, she was in a safe place where no one she knew could find her. That should be reassuring, but it wasn’t.