Snuff (9 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

Stacy’s ringtone chimed when John was pulling a navy shirt from his suitcase. He answered on speaker, fumbling with the row of buttons.

“Morning roll call,” she chirped.  “Just checking in.  I’m better than an alarm clock, right?  Anyway, I don’t have much for you yet, sorry.  Is there other stuff you want me to look into?”

Something Lisette said floated to the forefront of his mind.  “Actually, yes.  Can you look into large order contract jobs in the area?”

“Sure.  I figured I’d get a jump on this and look into red light cams and other moving violations on the nights and times of each dump job.  Can’t hurt, right, I bet this nut drove like a bat out of hell after he kicked
the girls out of his car.  If anything pops I’ll send you the information—it’s a big white van or SUV, right?”

“Right.
  I’ve emailed the coroner’s files and case reports.  I need you to go back three years and look for crimes that may fit the MO.  There’ve got to be victims who haven’t been linked to this man yet.”

“I’ll get on that after the traffic research.”
 

John frowned at his reflection.  “Does light blue go with navy blue?”

“Wear the stripey tie.”  She tapped in the background.  “Looking through contracting records will take longer than traffic research since I may have to get a little creative with their firewalls.  You know how people always hang up on me.  They never believe I work for the Bureau.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

She snapped her gum and laughed.  “Okay.  Well I’ll call in a few hours with what I’ve got.  Are you going to the station or the hospital first?”

“The hospital.  I need to speak to Brooke before I think about constructing a profile.”

“How’s she doing?”

John slung the tie over his shoulder and flipped the collar of his shirt up.  “She had a guard dog last time I saw her, so I can’t really say.  She looks sad, obviously.  Refuses to see her boyfriend for long, which doesn’t bode well.  Hopefully I won’t frighten her.”

“You’re the witness whisperer.  Witnesses think you walk on water.  And you’re pretty easy on the eyes except when you do the death glare.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

“
I thought I’d have an easy time choosing who wins, but it’s been harder than I thought.  Maybe because you two look similar.”

This is news to me.  Abby’s nothing but a faceless phantom, someone I feel and hear but never see.  Something present but invisible, like Christians claim God is.  They can’t see him, but he’s there, they say.  And I can’t see her, but I feel her tremble and her tears, when they slide down my skin, and her flesh oozing like it’s crying along with the pair of us when it crumbles beneath my fingertips. 

But if I work off that logic, it’s the same for this man.  His presence is here even when he isn’t, a whole lot more than lingering smoke from his Zippo, a demon that lives not so much above us, but in us.  Because that fear is never gone, even when he is. 

“Go to hell,” I spit at the ceiling.

“I think I’ll meet you there, sweetheart.”  He laughs.  “But Abigail might get there first.”

I crush Abby’s face into my chest as she tucks into a fetal position and lock my legs around hers.  “Stay the fuck away from her.”  It comes out wobbly but rips through my throat with jagged edges, and for a moment I think he might listen this time.

But I’ve never been lucky.

“Or what?”

He has me.  I can’t see where he is to attack him, wouldn’t get very far if I run.  

I say nothing, and he doesn’t either.  It’s just our three distinctly different breathing patterns.  His from one floor above, Abby’s slight, barely there, her skinny chest rising and falling against mine, but not panicked—more resigned.

I’m so furious I think I’m exhaling smoke.

“Don’t get any ideas.  You don’t want me to tie you up, do you?  I have a ball gag somewhere.  Some might like to see that.”

I never considered he’d do that.  If he ties me up, how can I pathetically try to protect Abby? 

I shake my head. 

“Then maybe you should be a good girl and let Daddy get on with business.”

I shudder.  My father’s been dead since I was ten, drank himself into an early grave beside his own father, and I haven’t called anyone by the moniker since. 

The door above the staircase opens. A splash of blue leaps in the blackness and evaporates when it clicks shut.

The hiss of his blowtorch extinguishes.  Four footsteps pound until I know, tightening my arms around Abby’s crispy shoulders, that he’s right next to us, sucking in our air, sinking into a crouch. 

His fingers walk up my ankle.  I pull my knee back and kick, but it hits nothing but air.  

“Please.”  I hate that I have to stoop to begging.  “Please don’t do this.  I’ll do whatever you want. Anything, I promise.  She can’t handle anymore.  Please.”

He doesn’t answer, just sparks the blowtorch again.  It stains the exposed bits of his face blue for a moment until bleeding to black. He’s wearing some stupid headband in addition to the ski mask and goggles.  A blinking red light flashes on it—a camera? 

Secon
ds tick by in slow motion.  Flames spring again, and I know what he’s after—the folds of flesh half-hidden between her legs.

I wish I was blind and it was dark again.

I fight with everything I’m worth, which isn’t much, but he still manages to splay her legs into a quivering V.

The torch shaves a path through a patch of curls, and the hair smokes before it melts and melds together, fusing into skin I know is sensitive, and only because it’s almost like I feel it too, every one of my muscles clenching like they’re performing Kegels on their own.

Her nails claw and cut through my forearms, and she screams louder.  Thick tears of rage and fear and pain I can’t even imagine seal my eyes shut.  I tug Abby sideways—the only movement I can manage when pinned between the wall and him—but it doesn’t help.

So I sag into the floor inhaling dust and old urine and cry until my lungs hurt
, and I feel dryer than bone.

***

Whatever happened to traumatic events giving people amnesia?  Just my luck I’m not fortunate enough to forget.

TWENTY-NINE

“I ran traffic violations and looked through red light
cams, and I might have someone,” Stacy told John, not half an hour after their last phone call.  “No idea if the guy’s got anything to do with the abductions.  I mean maybe he’s just an unlucky, crappy driver, huh?  He blew through a red light the night of the second dump job and was stopped for speeding the night of the third.  I guess someone called LAPD and gave the guy’s plates saying they thought the driver was drunk.  FYI, he wasn’t, I checked the incident report.” 

He plugged the ear he wasn’t using to drown the sporadic hospital alarms and chatter of nurses in the hallway he walked through on his way to Brooke’s room. “What does he drive?”

“White panel van.  It fits, but it might be a dead end.  Nothing else popped those nights.  As for contracting jobs, well, there’s a boatload I’ve combed through, and I found about a hundred and fifty matches.  I’ll email the information.  Sorry, I wasn’t able to trim it down more, because I kept the parameters wide so nobody would slip through the cracks.”

A hundred and fifty matches would be hell to investigate.  He’d be forced to delegate to detectives and patrol units
, which he hated, since he never fully trusted anyone that wasn’t him.  “And the other searches?”

“I need a little longer to find similar cases.  For the internet
thing, I have a few leads, but I’ll need at least another day to get anything solid.  Illegal websites have all sorts of protection and layers of encryption in place.  I shut down a rape site that pissed me off, but before you ask, no, none of your dead girls cropped up in the videos from, and I’m serious—fightmebitch.com.  I can cut time and give some of the work to another analyst—”

“Don’t do that.” 
Another analyst
was code for Alana.

“—but I figure you’d say no.  Sometimes I’m not sure whether I’m happy about being your favorite.  Sending you the information now, and expect an update call in a few hours.”

He disconnected and stopped to lean against the hallway wall and accessed his Bureau email.  Stacy’s latest messages and a few nasty notes from Bob sat in his inbox. 

The panel van had been driven by a man name Stanley Heckles, and his face was as unattractive as his name.  Spar
se brown hair styled into a comb-over.  Piggy, deep-set eyes beneath a unibrow.   No neck, as if his head sat solely upon his torso. 

Wouldn’t it be very convenient if we find overwhelming evidence pointing to Mr. Heckles’ guilt?
  the voice inquired. 
Though he does look the part, eh?

It had been in John’s experience that
looking the part
was a notion that didn’t exist.  More often, the nastiest monsters looked excessively, aggressively normal.  The best ones molded their appearances into polar opposites of their innards.  

He chewed his bottom lip.  Those eyes looked shifty, nervous.  And it was an image captured at the DMV.  What would make a person nervous in there?  If anything
, it made John homicidal.  Heckles’s were lips pressed together, the unibrow forced up in the center—surprise?  Fear?  Either way it was odd.

Odd unless a woman took the picture.

Brianna and Emily were the only girls proven to be sexually assaulted after death; the second and third dead girls at the dump sites. How far a stretch would it be to assume Heckles had a minor necrophilia problem?  Necrophiles could scarcely look a woman in the eye—would he drive around town with a living girl in the back of his van if he was? 

Probably not, but
perhaps it’s time to find out
, he thought, turning on his heel and dialing Sergeant Jennings’s cell.

THIRTY

He taps at his keyboard across the room from where Abby and I huddle.  I can’t touch her without inciting a painful gasp, but I know she’d rather have my hands on her than his.

I don’t think she’s bothered by her nakedness anymore.  I know I’m not.  We’re far beyond minor discomforts.

As the screen reflects against his face, I see his eyes clearly for the very first time behind a pair of goggles, though it only lasts a fraction of a second.     

They’re the same eyes I’ve seen on patients in a mental institution my favorite cousin has been locked up in since his schizophrenia got the best of him.  An aid in that facility told me one of those patients killed his mother with a pair of garden clippers, and even if I hadn’t known, his eyes would have scared the bejesus out of me.  Empty. No mercy, no life, no nothing.   They were savage. Feral, almost. 

I’ve seen those eyes on dogs in shelters.  I feel bad for them—it’s not their fault.  They’re like that for a reason. They’re collections of learned responses; conditioned to be vicious because all they’ve ever known is cruelty.  And by the time someone comes along to be nice, it’s too late. 

The only person I’ve ever hit with real passion is Jack, when he won’t stop tickling me.  I used to think it was torture.  I was stupid and naïve. 

I don’t want to hit this man right now.  Right now
, I want to use that knife he keeps in his back pocket and rip through him groin to sternum and laugh while he bleeds out, taking care to catch it all on tape to blast over the internet so this
friend
can watch and whack off to his death instead of Abby’s. 

My arms grow tenser and tighter around her with each passing second, lo
ng after the man stretches and heads up the stairs, slamming the door behind him.

Her
skinny fingers snarl around my elbow.  “You don’t have to protect me.”

I shush her.  What she’s suggesting is ridiculous, she knows it as well as I do.

“It’s okay.  I’m ready.”

I’m
not. So I shush her again.

“It’s my time.”

Like hell it is.  It’s not her time until she’s old and gray, sitting on a rocking chair next to Jerry.  It’s not her time because I’m not willing to let her go.  Vaguely I realize this is selfish, but it’s not easy for me either, sitting here listening, holding her and cringing when her skin splits and oozes pus under my fingertips. 

“No it’s not.  You’re still here. Right here with me. It’s not your time yet.”

We sigh at the same time—hers one of resignation, mine colored with every indescribable emotion pulsing through me: anger, fear, helplessness, love.  I haven’t known her more than two weeks, but I love her.  I know it as sure as anything.  

Something passes between us then, something paradoxically calm and electric. It makes me wonder for a moment if she’s tougher than me
and
the man who kidnapped us, just for living so long through this unending hell.

“I love you, Abby.”  It comes out lo
uder than I intend, but I want—need—her to know.  “I think you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

I feel her smile, and though I’ve never seen it, I know it’s got to be the most beautiful thing in the world. “I think the same about you.”

I can’t see how she draws that conclusion. My only achievement is that I’m not dead yet.

***

I stare into the ceiling light until my eyes burn, but still can’t place where I’ve heard the man’s voice.  It rings a small bell of recognition, but tracing back then whens and wheres is useless.  He could be anything, anyone.  A voice-over on an infomercial, an MTV VJ. A talk-show host, or a figment of my imagination.