Creatures of Appetite

Todd Travis

Copyright © 2013 by Todd Travis

Kindle Edition

Cover illustration by

Bosa Grgurevic:
www.Buddhacandy.com

His nickname …
The Iceman
.

A deranged serial killer roams wintry rural Nebraska targeting little girls with a demented purpose that no one can fathom.

Special Agent
EMMA KANE
, a former DC cop and damaged goods now with the FBI, is assigned to babysit burned-out profiler
JACOB THORNE
, once the best but now said to have lost his edge, as they both fly to Nebraska to catch this maniac.

Thorne is erratic, abrasive and unpredictably brilliant, but what he and Kane find in the heartland is much more than anyone bargained for, especially when the Iceman challenges them personally, where it hurts most. The clock is ticking and a little girl’s life is on the line. And maybe even more with that, once they find out what he’s really up to.

M
aureen dragged her
daughter Tami through the crowded outdoor Flea Market on the hunt for a deal. Snow fell, covering the school parking lot, the entire market, customers and vendors alike, but that stopped no one. In Nebraska during the winter, snow fell nearly every other day, but the Flea Market was but once a month.

And no one looked forward to it more than Maureen. While some women were addicted to soap operas, some to pills and others to Facebook, Maureen’s drug of choice was secondhand sales.

It wasn’t from economical necessity, for her husband Richard was a good provider with a decent job and good benefits. It was simply that the search for bargains was Maureen’s personal primal urge. Each find a treasure, each dollar saved a victory, and as a result very few items in Maureen’s household were brand new, except for her husband’s golf clubs and, of course, everyone’s underwear.

Even Richard, divorced when he met Maureen ten years earlier, would remark that she’d been primarily interested in him because he was used goods, but he smiled when he said that. And it was easy for him to have a sense of humor about it, since he wasn’t forced to accompany Maureen on her excursions as Tami was.

Tami, only five years old and definitely not used goods, was very much bored by it all, the Flea Market, the yelling and especially the constant pulling from place to place. Tami eyed the nearly empty school playground and yanked at her mother’s hand.

“Mommy, swings!”

“Hush, Tami, Mommy’s busy.”

Maureen spotted a marked-down Crock-Pot and released Tami’s hand to beat two other housewives to it. Finally free, Tami took advantage and made for the playground, away from the crowd and the noise as Maureen argued with her competitors.

Tami wandered over to the swings, her boots crunching in the snow, and gave each one a push to watch it go back and forth. She noticed two boys, a couple of years older than she, next to the jungle gym on the other end of the playground. The boys beckoned Tami over and she shyly joined them.

“You wanna see something really scary?” the larger of the two asked, frozen mucous crusted on his upper lip.

Tami nodded, proud to be included in the activities of the older children. The smaller boy, a scarf wrapped around his lower face so that only his eyes could be seen, pointed a snow-covered mitten into the shadows underneath the jungle gym.

“Tami!” Maureen called out over the crowd but the children paid no attention.

Tami wasn’t quite able to make out what was on the ground. She slipped under the gym bars to get a closer look. The boys stayed right where they were.

“Tami Sue Paulson!” Maureen yelled, more frantic and closer now.

Tami finally got near enough for a good look at it and stopped right in her tracks. She put her mitten-covered thumb into her mouth, her eyes wide as saucers. Maureen, Crock-Pot tucked under one arm, marched over to the jungle gym.

“Tami Sue Paulson, how many times do I have to tell you about wandering off-”

Maureen stopped. The Crock-Pot fell from her hands and broke on the ground. Her face froze in mid-sentence for an instant, and then melted into a horrendous scream.

The two boys gawked, shocked at the volume of noise the grown-up was able to produce. Tami didn’t even acknowledge her mother, just sucked her thumb and stared at the object, or rather objects, on the ground.

In the shadows, a child’s foot lay, frozen and bare. Another foot, mate to the first, was also in the vicinity on the ground but at enough distance away to suggest that the two feet were no longer joined together by a body.

Maureen screamed and screamed as her daughter simply sucked her own thumb, unable to look away from the pieces of a dead child’s body on the playground.

S
pecial Agent Emma Kane
forced herself to stop pacing and instead leaned against the dark sedan double-parked outside the auditorium on Eleventh Avenue. A few homeless people eyed her as they scavenged through the trash for empty cans and other forgotten treasures. She eyed them right back. She’d never liked New York City.

Kane, thirty-three with dark hair, deep blue eyes and the natural build of an athlete, was considered by many to be an attractive woman, but Kane herself considered her looks, as well as those who considered her looks, to be of secondary importance in the grand scheme of things. Kane did what she could to underplay it, wore conservative clothes and shoes, avoided skirts and jewelry and of course never put on makeup. But she got attention anyway and hated it with every fiber of her being.

Her right foot tapped on the ground several times unconsciously like a mad puppet until she caught herself at it.

Nerves, I’m nervous, Kane thought, I can’t be nervous. I’m on my first assignment and I’m about to meet a legend. Nervousness not allowed, she told herself.

Kane reflected on her status as a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, effective all of six days. She was fresh from Quantico and didn’t want it to show. It wasn’t as though she were an untested rookie; after all, she was a seasoned investigator with a drawer full of citations and even a medal.

A cop in DC for twelve years, she started out as a uniform and spent her last eight years as a detective in Homicide where she’d done very well. Her rise in the ranks, even before The Van Incident, had been stellar due to her natural smarts and hard work. It was naturally whispered that her good fortune had as much to do with her physical attributes as her close rate, but that was just jealous bullshit gossip.

Kane saw the smirks and heard the rumors, of course, but ignored them while systematically closing case after case. She loved the work, loved the long hours, most of all she loved being in the right, which was how she thought of the law. The law was about fighting for what was right, standing up for it no matter what. Once she’d made up her mind in regard to what was right and what was not, Kane was unbendable, which oftentimes put her at odds with her superiors.

That attitude, Kane’s looks, her disinterest in socializing with other cops and her cold temper made her less than popular within the division. The rumor she was on the fast track to Internal Affairs didn’t help, either.

Though heavily recruited, Kane had no interest in IAD; she liked the street, but once tagged as IAD fodder, the label was hard to get rid of. She’d had three partners in her eight years in Homicide and hadn’t been close to any of them. Her first two partners were older married men and very careful not to get too familiar with her, lest it might somehow lead to rumors that could wreck their marriages and careers.

Her last partner was female and the worst of the bunch; she could barely speak to Kane without a sneer on her face. The woman, an experienced detective with the air of a tough biker grandmother, often acted offended by Kane’s very existence within the department. Kane shouldered it all, the snickers and whispered comments, her partner’s disdain, caught up in the work.

This was all before The Van Incident, as she liked to refer to her very last Homicide case in DC. It was easier for her to think of it that way, in her head it was always The Van Incident in capital letters; somehow that made it less raw and painful despite the acclaim and honor the case brought her.

After The Van Incident, her partner no longer treated Kane with barely masked annoyance; her partner and almost everyone in her division looked at her with only guilt and pity. Kane preferred the annoyance and disdain. An opportunity to go federal presented itself during the media circus afterward and she leapt for it.

And here she was, a federal officer.

Kane spotted an object on the ground in the alley between the auditorium and the building next to it. It broke her out of her reverie and made her blood rush.

The object appeared to be flesh-colored.

Kane moved into the alley fast and headed for what looked like a small, bare white foot lying on the ground in the alley, covered in trash. Catching her breath, Kane crouched down and carefully moved the trash out of the way with a pen, revealing a broken toy doll, missing the other leg and foot.

A toy. It was just a toy. Kane stared at it a moment and exhaled slowly. Jumpy, she thought, not only am I nervous, I’m also jumpy.

Kane stood and walked back down the alley toward her sedan, frustrated with herself. Three tough-looking Hispanic men on their way down the sidewalk filled the alley exit to the street. They chattered back and forth with each other until they saw Kane standing in the alley. They stopped to stare. The largest whistled and the short one made an obscene gesture with his tongue.

“Oh Mommy,” said the man in the middle. They didn’t move from where they stood, in essence blocking Kane’s way out.

Kane shook her hair out of her eyes and continued out of the alley. The men didn’t move out of her way and Kane had to pass close as they openly leered. A small ball of anger and fear festered in the pit of her stomach. At the last second, before she stepped completely past them, the largest man winked to his friends, reached down and grabbed a handful of Kane’s ass.

Kane grabbed the big man’s hand quick and twisted, putting him into a wristlock. He yelled in pain and went down on his knees. The two remaining men took a threatening step but the business end of Kane’s automatic pistol stopped them. The barrel of her gun shook, just a bit.

“I don’t think your mothers would be very proud of you right at this moment,” Kane said. “But maybe they wouldn’t give a shit, because if this is the way you treat women, then they didn’t do a very good job of raising you.”