Kill Me Once (27 page)

He pauses and runs his sparkling reptilian eyes over the length of Liza’s broken body. ‘Damn, girl, you’re not much of a scholar, but you’re one hell of a sexy little wildcat, you know that? You and I could have been something really special, but you had to go and fuck things up before we got the chance to find out, didn’t you? Now look where it’s got you.’

And that is all Ahn needs to hear. She has finally seen and heard enough. The man in the room with her is clearly insane, and she knows lunatics are completely incapable of regulating their own actions. This one simple and incontrovertible fact makes him exponentially more dangerous than all the other malevolence in the world combined.

Violent, uncontrollable shivers rack her as she presses her tiny body up against the cold concrete wall under the bed – as far away from him, as far away from the
demon
, as she can possibly get. The bones in her skeleton rattle like loose window panes in a passing train as she waits for the unimaginably horrifying feeling of his blood-smeared gloved hand on the back of her neck. He will pull her out from under the bed now, she knows – just another terrified rabbit chosen for the slaughter. He will pull her out from under the bed and to her certain, horrible death.

Several agonising moments pass as Ahn listens to him breathe. The rhythmic tide of his heavy breath is the only sound in the room now, dark waves of evil crashing loudly against the shores of insanity. His breathing sounds excited.

Retching, she realises he is
enjoying
himself.

There is a pause as he holds this last breath longer than the others. Then, unbelievably, she hears the sound of his footsteps as he turns and walks slowly to the door.

He seems to pause there for several endless moments, as though he is trying to decide whether he should turn around and kill her after all, before she finally hears the door shut behind him with a soft
click
.

Only silence now. Ahn strains her ears for the sound of his terrible breath.

Nothing.

He is gone. The demon has spared her.

But
why?

The reason isn’t important. He is gone and that is all that matters now.

She waits beneath the bed for five more minutes just to be absolutely certain, carefully timing it on her wristwatch. When the time finally passes several lifetimes later, she once again strains her ears for the sound of his maniacal breathing.

Still nothing. The only sound in the room now is coming from the annoyingly incessant hum of the fluorescent light above. With every last fibre of her being, Ahn wishes the goddamn humming would just stop! If she doesn’t get out now the sound will surely drive her mad.

An intense combination of fear and shock and adrenalin convulses her tiny body as she peeks out from beneath the bed skirt, determined not to look at the gruesome sight of her murdered friends – her murdered
sisters
– before walking through the room and to a telephone from which she can call the police. But in the exact instant her head appears she looks up in horror to see his heavy black boot coming down on her face.

The back of her skull is driven into the floor with the sheer blunt force of a sledgehammer slamming into a cinder block. The fragile bones in her face have little choice but to shatter away into a thousand tiny pieces at the crushing impact. Somehow, he has stationed himself right next to the bed, right next to
her
, without ever having made the slightest sound. He has tricked her.

The demon has tricked her.

Ahn Howser does not have time to worry further that her gaze will fall unintentionally upon the grisly scene in which Lindsey McCormick and Liza Alloway have played out their final acts, for this night will serve as her curtain call as well. Just as it is that there are angels who walk the Earth, so it follows there must be demons as well. The delicate bones in her face have splintered as easily as an eggshell beneath his heavy foot, and the waffled sole of his huge black boot is the last thing she will ever see in this life.

A moment later, her world fades away blissfully into eternal darkness.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Nathan grabs the Asian girl beneath her slender arms and drags her petite body roughly from beneath the bed like a rag doll before giving her the same treatment with the knife that he’s given her friends. Though the little gook is already quite dead, he wants to be fair to the others, so he removes the switchblade from his back pocket and slices her windpipe with a quick flick of his powerful wrist.

It is easy work
, he thinks. Easy and not in the least bit unpleasant.

No one has heard the commotion in the room. The campus is a ghost town for the Thanksgiving holiday break, and Nathan has planned these murders to take place at precisely this time for exactly that reason. When you have
years
to plan a mission, you can afford the luxury of getting every last detail right. And that’s exactly what he’s done. Now all he has to do is avoid the goddamn security guards on his way out and he’ll be home free.

His gloved hands now very slick with the beautiful blood he has spilled here tonight, they slip a little as he wraps them around the Asian girl’s impossibly thin neck. Finally finding purchase in her throat, it pleases him greatly to hear the birdlike bones snap as he viciously squeezes the remaining air from her dead lungs.

He leans down and gently lifts her destroyed face to his own, pressing his lips to hers with great tenderness. He lingers there for several long moments, tasting the blood on his lips, on his tongue, in his mouth.

He has waited so very long for this moment! He has waited long but it has been well worth the wait.

Regretfully breaking the kiss, he brushes the back of a gloved hand across the girl’s mouth to remove any trace of saliva that he may have left there. He is a very careful man. He has to be. He requires everything to be perfect. Everything. Perfect and clean. Anything less is unacceptable.

From the briefcase come a hammer and a nail. From the pocket of his black jeans comes the parking ticket he swiped off the Chrysler Sebring. Five swift and accurate blows affix the citation squarely to the centre of the Asian girl’s fragile breastbone.

Breadcrumb hammered home, he moves back to the others and favours their corpses with his blood-kiss as well before once again rising to his feet.

‘Thank you,’ he says, his voice cracking with such great emotion that he thinks he will surely cry.

Their wonderful gift is now part of something far more important than anything they could ever have hoped to accomplish on their own. They are connected in eternity now, the whole of their beings much greater than the simple sum of their parts.

They will all go down in history together.

Bowing to them with a graceful flourish, he bends deeply at the waist in a courtly manner, the brilliant actor acknowledging his breathless and appreciative audience.

And so it is that Nathan Stiedowe is solemn as he walks out of the dormitory room and down the empty hallway, finally allowing the tears of gratitude freely to sting his eyes like a million tiny needles.

Shoving open the heavy outer door with ease, he descends the metal staircase and slowly disappears across campus, a solitary figure fading away into the inky darkness of the cold night.

Looking up into the night sky, he sees that it has begun to snow. This makes him smile. A new season is upon them.

It is the season of the eagle.

PART IV

REPRISING DAVID BERKOWITZ

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Dana found a cab outside the terminal at O’Hare and reached into the front pocket of her jeans before handing the driver the address she’d hurriedly scribbled down on a Post-It note. It was almost midnight by the time they finally pulled up to the entrance of Chicago Police Headquarters on a busy downtown street bustling with traffic.

Dana rubbed at her temples and stifled a loud yawn. Chicago was her fifth major city in the space of little less than a week, and they were all beginning to look oddly the same to her weary eyes.

A squat man with a powerful build and the boxy scrunched-up face of a bulldog met her as she ascended the cement steps in front of the building. ‘Special Agent Whitestone?’ he asked in a deep voice tinged with an unmistakable southern drawl.

‘That’s me.’

He smiled. ‘I’m Detective Constantine Konstantopolous, but you can just call me CK. Everybody else does. We’ve been trying to call you for an hour now.’

Dana felt in her pocket for her cellphone, suddenly realising that she hadn’t remembered to turn it back on when her plane touched down. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

The Chicago cop’s face darkened. ‘The killer slipped right through our fingers.’

Dana was so shocked for a moment that she couldn’t even breathe. ‘Not again,’ she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

The cop shook his head in disgust. ‘He stayed away from the hospitals, but three nursing students were found murdered an hour ago in a dorm room at Loyola University. The killer hammered a parking ticket into one of their chests.’

Dana’s stomach lurched. For a brief moment she was afraid she was going to throw up again. She’d been on the plane when the killer had struck this time. Not only were three more people dead, Dana had stopped off at home in Cleveland to play chicken at the house of her childhood instead of heading directly out to Chicago. No way in
hell
they were going to let her stay on the case now. Still, her brain automatically snapped into action, processing the parking-ticket clue – the mental equivalent of a whiplash reflex.

David Berkowitz. Wait until she told Crawford.

The notorious serial killer known as the ‘Son of Sam’ had terrorised New York City in the 1970s. He’d finally been caught when somebody had decided to check out the parking citations handed out on the night of one of his murders. Not exactly a subtle connection there.

To CK, she said, ‘What else do you have?’

The Chicago cop pulled open the door to the station house and held it for her as she stepped inside. ‘Well, there’s also a chance there may be a link to some unsolved murders out in Wyoming. We’ve got the ex-boyfriend of one of the victims in custody now – found him hiding in a dumpster on campus shortly after the discovery of the bodies.’

Dana’s heart flipped despite the dread of knowing just how badly she’d messed up by not immediately coming out to Chicago.
They had a suspect in custody? Their
killer
?

CK filled her in on the rest as they walked down a bustling corridor past petty thieves and painted-up prostitutes handcuffed to O-rings on holding benches.

‘Campus was pretty empty because of the holiday break, so no witnesses. Nobody we’ve talked to so far saw or heard anything. Pretty grisly scene, knife was used. Finger marks around the throats of all three victims, but no prints to run through Interpol. Coroner says it’s tough to figure out what actually killed the girls – the knife or the strangling – but she figures either method could have turned the trick on its own.’

CK paused and ran his stubby fingers through his thinning black hair. ‘Oh, and get this. The ex-girlfriend of our suspect also had all the fingers on her right hand chopped off with some kind of heavy-duty scissors or something.’

Dana winced.

‘Yeah. Not pretty. Anyway, his clothes were all crusted in dried blood. Said it’s hog-slaughtering season back home on the ranch in Wyoming and he just didn’t bother changing before heading out to Loyola. The clothes are at the lab now, just waiting for the test results to come back. Should be tomorrow, Thursday at the latest. Like I said before, turns out he’s the ex-boyfriend of one of the murdered girls. His name is Trent Bollinger.’

CK nodded at the desk sergeant and took in a lungful of air before resuming his narrative. ‘We called up to Wyoming to check him out and when they heard about what’s going on around here they told us they’ve had a spate of similar murders up there.
Spate
– helluva nice word, huh? But that’s exactly what they said. A
spate.’

CK shook his head and continued. ‘Anyway, we’ve got Bollinger in lock-up now, but he’s not talking. Says we’re a bunch of assholes and we can just go fuck ourselves seven ways to Sunday. Doesn’t want a lawyer, either. Claims we’re trying to pin a murder rap on him and he’s not saying anything to anybody from now on. To tell you the truth, we were kind of hoping you could use your female powers of persuasion to change all that.’

Dana turned to him as they came to a stop in front of the holding cells. ‘I’ll see what I can do, CK, but I’d really prefer to take a look at the murder scene before I talk to Bollinger. Is there any way someone could take me over there for a look around?’

The Chicago cop didn’t miss a beat. ‘How would I do, ma’am?’

Dana nodded. ‘Thank you, sir. You’ll do just fine.’

CHAPTER FIFTY

CK led Dana through a labyrinth of halls in the sprawling metro police station and out to the parking lot where the unmarked cars were kept. They got inside a battered 1986 Toyota Corolla with peeling brown paint and a heavily dented front fender and talked on the short ride over to Loyola. Dana found CK’s inconsequential everyday chatter reassuring. She needed it right now to block out the turmoil of emotion she was feeling, let alone the incessant negative chatter going on in her own head.

‘Married, three kids here,’ he was telling her over the static of the police radio. ‘I swear to God, my Becky’s an angel for putting up with a mug like this one. Luckily the kids all got their good looks from her. How about you? Married? Boyfriend? Any kids?’

Dana shook her head. ‘Nope. Not married, no boyfriend. No kids, either, unless you wanna count Oreo, of course.’

‘Who’s Oreo?’

So she told him all about the day she’d found her furry little friend at the animal shelter near her home.

Oreo was one of about thirty kittens she’d stopped to pet in their cages. After scratching him behind his pointy ears for a moment, she’d started to move on to the next cage when Oreo had stuck his little paw through the bars and snagged the arm of her sweater. Looking directly into her pale blue eyes with his greenish-yellow ones, he’d let out a soft, heartbreaking meow – as though to ask her where the hell she thought she was going. Wasn’t
he
good enough for her? The kitten had stolen her heart in that very moment and they’d been together ever since.