“Sounds good to me. That’ll teach Mama. She locks me out, I get stoned with some family man. And when she doesn’t know where I am in the morning, she’ll really get worried. I bet this is the last time she does this to me.”
“I’ll bet it is, too.”
He settled back in the seat and enjoyed the ride. She regaled him with stories about different drugs she’d done, nothing serious. Speed to get through finals, Quaaludes once in a while. He told her about his experience with angel dust and the times he’d done mushrooms.
He’d never done a drug in his life. He didn’t like losing control.
He pulled onto a road that was nearly grown over with vegetation. As soon as the car was a suitable distance off the highway, and hidden from sight, he pulled to a stop at a metal gate that blocked the way. NO TRESSPASSING! TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT! the rusty sign stated. Beyond that, the road disappeared beneath layers of leaves and growth. He quelled the urge to giggle in delight as the first look of apprehension melted her grin. Once he cut the headlights, they were thrown into darkness.
“Clancy, this is kinda creepy.”
“Don’t worry about it. I know the way by heart, and it’s not far from here. There’s nothing to be afraid of, I promise.” Even though he always asked their name, he never used it. She was not a person with a mother and boyfriend, she was something for his pleasure. His reward.
Still she hesitated, staring into the blackness in front of the car.
“We can skip the joint if you’re uneasy,” he offered.
She pushed her door open. “Let’s do it.”
As soon as they approached the gate, the sensor was triggered, sending a message to his beeper. It always soothed him when it went off, as it did now. The moment anyone got near the special place, he’d be alerted.
From the gate, even in the daytime, his special place couldn’t be seen. It was, contrary to what he’d said, quite a distance from the gate. The building was hardly visible in the gloom, but he knew exactly where it was. It was at night that he visited it the most. He unlocked the rusty hinge lock, opened the old wooden door and stepped inside.
The battery-powered light cast a dim glow throughout the small room. It smelled musty, but there was nothing to indicate what had happened there before, the pleas for mercy, the sex, or the blood. The walls were painted dark red to match the exterior. A battered table sat off to the side, a dilapidated couch sat against the wall. A twin bed with rust-spotted head and foot rails was tucked into the corner. All from junk sales out of town. Beneath the bed, where she couldn’t see, was a bedpan. He’d learned that freeing them to relieve themselves gave them an opportunity to escape. More than anything, he was a man who valued his freedom.
The windows were boarded up. There was a small fireplace, but he never lit it for fear of drawing attention. Details like that got the others caught. He had no intention of getting caught.
The girl looked around. If they came here voluntarily, which was rare, they always took in the place. That gave him the opportunity to remove the handcuffs from beneath the sofa cushion.
“Pretty rough, huh?” he said with a chuckle. “I’ve thought about fixing it up, but I’m just not here enough to warrant it.”
“What else do you do here?” She was looking at the bed.
“When you’ve got three kids, you need some down time. We have a farm, and I’m with them all day. Sometimes I need a break, or I feel like I’ll explode.”
The mention of the kids took the edge off her expression. “Where’s the stuff?”
He knelt down beside the bed and slid his hand beneath the musty gray mattress. “Right under...” His hand slid in deeper. “Wait a minute. I had most of a dime bag right here. Maybe it slipped through the frame.”
She knelt down near him and helped him look. “Could someone have found it?”
“I doubt that. No one even knows this place exists, as far as I can tell. It’s got to be here somewhere.”
“There’s an old bedpan under here,” she said, distaste in her voice.
“Oh, that’s where it is. I forgot, I’d stuck in there just in case. Can you reach it? Just shove it this way.”
He reached beneath the bed and clamped the handcuff on her wrist. The disbelief was always the best part.
“Hey, what are you doing?” She jerked back, but he had a firm hold on the other cuff. “Oh, my God, what are you doing?”
She started to scramble to her feet. He knocked her on the bed and landed hard on top of her. A gust of breath whooshed from her lungs, leaving her temporarily weakened while he clamped the other cuff around the iron rod. The second pair of cuffs was within reach beneath the mattress. He grabbed it just as she started to struggle again.
“No, please, don’t do this. If it’s sex you want, I’ll give it to you. Just please don’t cuff me.”
He cuffed her other hand, hearing the pleasant sound of metal against metal as she started to jerk her hands downward. In a cold voice, he said, “It’s not just sex I want.”
“Oh, no, please, God, no.”
He settled back, straddling her waist. This was the fear he enjoyed most, when they were manacled to the bed, knowing there was no escape, no hope. They were going to go through something terrible, and the best they could hope for was to get out alive. He sometimes told them he’d let them go if they behaved, and they believed him...for a while anyway.
She started screaming then. He could tell her that no one would hear her, that they were too far away from the road or any other house. That sounded trite and overused, so he grabbed the rag he kept beneath the mattress and stuffed it into her mouth. He wondered if she could taste the other girls’ saliva.
Her nostrils flared as she took in air in her panicked breathing. He simply watched her. Sweet anticipation surged through his loins. If only this part could last forever. He had been keeping them longer lately, several days sometimes, visiting them when he could. He drew such pleasure just thinking about them waiting for him. Keeping them indefinitely would be trickier. He doubted they could escape, but one never knew. That’s how the others were caught, when one got away and identified them. They kept trophies, too, adding to the evidence. He was smarter than that. Sure, he liked having something to remind him of the pleasure they’d given him. He had a better plan.
He slid down her legs as she bucked beneath him. The leg cuffs were already clamped to the corner rail hidden beneath the mattress. He gently removed her green Converse sneaker and closed the cuff around her ankle. Then he did the same to her other foot.
He caressed the sneaker with affection. It was ingenious, really. A shoe was often tossed carelessly out a car window. There it sat for weeks, months, even years, lying among the other litter along the side of the road. Nobody thought twice about it as they drove past it every day. Nobody but him. He looked for them, the pleasure of anticipation building as he neared where he left one. Always a distance from the town where the girl lived. He’d remember everything about the girl, every delicious detail.
Until the need grew too large for the fantasy to sate it. Then the slow build of anticipation grew again as he searched for the next girl, the next opportunity.
The best part was that his trophies were right there for everyone to see. Trash to them, memories for him. His secret. And if one was connected to the missing girl, it told them nothing about the crime or her whereabouts. He always washed them before carefully setting them in their spot. Sometimes the authorities found them and the news would report the great “lead.” They would launch a search in the area to no avail.
Muffled cries brought his attention back to the girl. He slid off her and went to the drawer. Her eyes bugged out even more when he pulled out the twelve-inch knife. He approached slowly, knifepoint held facing upward. He liked the opposite of terrified surprise, too. When they were sure he was going to cut them, he cut their clothing instead. Very carefully, he sliced away the seams. He enjoyed every whimper, as the blade touched their delicate skin, as the point sometimes grazed them. It was too early to draw blood.
Once she was naked, he set the knife down. Then he stared at her with dispassionate eyes that belied the burning lust in his soul. Her legs were spread to each corner of the bed, as were her arms. She was ready for him, like a bug in a spider’s web, trapped without hope of escape.
“Now, the fun begins,” he said as he stepped closer.
Silas woke with a jerk, but the dread started even before he found himself in his vehicle parked along the side of the road. Fingers of dawn’s light were creeping up over the line of trees to the east. One lone car drove past, sending the weeds into a frantic dance. The images of the night before crowded back into his mind, as vivid as they’d been while it had been happening: the terrified girl shackled to the bed, the feelings of pleasure as she struggled and pleaded with her eyes. The vile acts that followed. Nausea rose in his stomach, though he’d learned to keep it at bay. Still, he broke out in a cold sweat.
Every time the killer struck, he took Silas with him. Since that day in prison, when Charles Swenson had reached across the table and grabbed Silas’s arm. When Silas had seen and felt the atrocities Swenson had committed, and worse, why he’d committed them. Silas had understood the man’s mind, had felt all the shadows in his black heart.
It had opened a door he wished he could close. A door that allowed evil to flow into his soul. Since that day, he witnessed the deeds of the man he called The Ghost. And every time he struck, Silas got closer to being there at the moment of the kidnapping.
With weary resignation, he climbed out of the vehicle and searched for the signpost he’d seen in the final image. He looked down the slope and saw what the killer had discarded: a green sneaker. He felt nausea rise again. It was still damp where the killer had washed it. It was the first time he’d been this close. Usually he had to go searching for it.
He was getting closer to the killer. Silas had never seen his face, only the heinous crimes he committed. And when he caught up with him, what then? How long could one stare into the abyss before the abyss swallowed him? And the question that haunted him most: What if the killer wore his face?
CHAPTER 4
The All-Animals Hospital hadn’t changed much in the years Katie had known it. She had planted some rhododendron bushes along the front of the building and at the road, but the driveway and lot were still gray gravel. The building had been a house back in the early nineteen hundreds. Later, it had been transformed to a law office, and years later into the animal hospital.
Inside, the bright walls were nearly blinding. Ben liked everything to look clean and professional. That’s why she wore her standard black polyester pants and white blouse. He wore his smock. Not that he had anything to worry about; they were the only veterinary hospital in Flatlands, and the only one within a great distance that serviced the rural areas and farms.
In all the years she’d been married to Ben, all the years she’d known him, he’d never changed. He treated the animals with love and gentleness and their owners with respect. That was what won her respect for him, that the residents of Possum Holler were treated with the same civility as those who lived in the nicer areas.
“Don’t you worry a thing about that,” Ben was telling one plump woman who’d brought her cat in after it had lost a fight with a neighbor’s dog. “Bellflower will be fine, and you can pay me whenever you’ve got the money.” That meant never, but it made the customers feel like they weren’t getting charity. They had pride, just as her mother had had pride.
Katie smiled as she wrote up the slip and gave the woman the medications Ben had prescribed. “You remember my kitten, don’t you? Boots, the one Gary threw against the glass window?”
“Oh, yeah, I remember.” The woman obviously also remembered that no one believed Gary had done it.
“He came out of it all right. He survived, even with brain damage, lived a good, long life. Bellflower will come out of this, too.”
“Thank you. And thank your husband again for me. He’s the nicest man in the whole universe, he is.”
“He sure is.” She pulled the paperwork for their afternoon patients. He was wonderful, every woman’s dream. He was older, yes, but he wasn’t out sowing his wild oats with the other young bucks in town, either.
“The Williams’s puppy is coming out of anesthesia,” Ben said, walking out of the recovery room. Skunk been hit by a car, unfortunately a common occurrence in the rural areas. “I think he’s going to make it.”
“Oh, good. I made them promise to fence in an area for him if he made it through.”
The waiting area was empty, and Ben took the opportunity to slide up behind her. “I see shadows in your eyes, Katie. Aren’t you happy?”
“Of course I am.” He had a way of making her feel guilty for every bad feeling she ever had.
“I want to know what my girl’s thinking.”
She turned to him. “I’m okay.”
“You know I want an open marriage, Katie. What’s going on?”
“I just...sometimes I feel lonely. Disconnected from the world.”
His mouth tightened. “Aren’t I enough for you?”
“Yes, you’re enough for me.”
“What’s the problem then?”
“Just a mood, I guess. It’s nothing.”
“I love you. You know that, don’t you?”
She nodded. “I love you , too.”
Instead of lightening, his face shadowed. “Sometimes I hear the words, but I don’t see it in your face.”
She hugged him, trying to emphasize her words with a hard squeeze. “I do love you, Ben. You’re my life.” That was true. She did love Ben, in some way. She’d loved him since she was a girl, when he’d saved Boots, and then saved her. And he was her life. Maybe that was the problem. He was her whole life.
When the door opened, they stepped apart. Bertrice dropped her glitter-painted book bag and looked at them.
“What’s wrong? I know that look. Don’t tell me you’re fighting. I get enough of that at home, with my mom threatening to divorce my dad every ten minutes. You two can’t get divorced. You’re like, the best example of a happy couple I know, otherwise I’d probably never get married.”