Naked Cruelty (42 page)

Having solved all that to her satisfaction, Helen stepped into the Jacuzzi and lay being gently pummeled by streams and jets of water for twenty minutes before emerging to wrap herself in a towel and go about her very last chores—bag and gun.

Her handbag went into a Chinese coromandel cabinet inside the front door; in the early days she had left it lying around anywhere, then Delia had objected, explaining that, since the bag held a firearm, she must conceal it. Looking back, Helen knew now that more than her gun had been vulnerable. So had her work journals. Not that anyone ever read them, but Delia had been right, it was better to be sure than sorry.

Her 9mm Parabellum pistol never remained in the bag these days, hadn't in many weeks. It went under a pillow on her bed and stayed there until the morning. If, as tonight, she came home with someone, she left the person in the living room or, in Kurt's case, the study, while she used her private bathroom—an excuse that let her enter the bedroom so she could park her weapon. She readied the gun for firing: safety off and a round in the chamber. If an intruder woke her, she didn't have to fiddle. Tomorrow she would eject the round, insert it in the magazine, and put the safety on. That way, no accident.

I'm tired, she thought, wandering toward the bed.

Something cannoned into her back so forcibly that she went down in a heap on the floor, her face in the white bedroom carpet, her arms behind her back. The towel had gone in the initial attack, but Helen forgot all about modesty as she fought to free herself. He had her face downward and was sitting on her ribs; part of her fight was just to breathe, and she couldn't seem to use her legs above the knees. Cold metal closed around her ankles and fettered her, then came the click of handcuffs on her wrists. Arms and legs were almost immobilized.

He yanked her on to her back so that she could see him, at the exact moment that she opened her mouth to shout for help. She didn't seem able to scream, but she could shout, she could definitely shout! Too late. He had the duct tape over her mouth. You fool, you fool! Why didn't you shout?

She didn't need to see his face to know it was Kurt. In a weird way, her subconscious had always known Kurt was the Dodo. At dinner tonight, for sure. The paperweight … Why hadn't her consciousness seen the truth of its significance? She
had
known, but something in her mind refused to let her admit his name, let her see what tonight had made manifest. After his frankness at Solo's table, he had nowhere to go except to this.

“Your bed is hedonistic,” he said, looking disgusted. “How many pigs can fit on it at one and the same moment?”

She tossed her head about furiously, drummed her feet on the carpet, made noises of frustration, while her eyes blazed up into his devoid of fear. Take off the gag, let me talk!

Jerking her to her feet, he propelled her to the bed with a series of vicious kicks on the buttocks—he hurt, he hurt! At the bed, he dealt her an even stronger, harder kick that saw her upper half land three feet up the mattress. But her feet and legs didn't make it, nor could she summon up the traction to move them in any direction; however she tried, they slipped. Then he grasped the ankle chain and lifted her legs himself, arranged her on the bed to please some idea of his own. Tears slid from the corners of her eyes, but he couldn't know why: she wept because he had put her on the far side of a king bed from her gun. Now she had to cross an acre of bed to reach it.

Her mimed show of defiance had produced a reaction; he ripped off the tape.

“Scream, and you will wish you had not,” he said.

“I'm only crying because I can't kill you.”

A statement that made him laugh. “You are unique, Helen! I am delighted to talk to you. You are so interesting.”

“Thank you, kind sir,” she said mockingly. “How many of those marvelous disguises did you use, Kurt?”

“I did not count. I enjoy acting.”

“Why switch from rape to murder? Why kill Melantha?”

“Boredom, as much as anything. I needed fresh stimulus.”

“Catherine dos Santos must have stimulated!”

“Yes, I enjoyed that. A close call, but I was alive.”

“You're crazy, Kurt.”

That stung. “I am not insane! I am a genius!”

“Yes, you are a genius, but in a limited way,” she said, deciding to humor and insult him simultaneously. “A Renaissance man you're not. Really, all you are is a mathematician with a passion for sub-atomic particles. You couldn't even get the Dodo's taxonomic name right.”

“My choice of the Linnaean name was deliberate,” he said loftily. “The bird is an extinct species, therefore inept indeed. What kind of bird walks up to a hungry man and begs to be eaten? The modern taxonomic name is ludicrous!
Didus ineptus
it was, and
Didus ineptus
it is to me.”

“But why call yourself a dodo?” Talk to him, talk to him!

“My species is extinct.”

“What species is that?”

“
Didus ineptus.
”

He won't tell me that, she thought. Whatever his reason, it's locked inside his mania. “Tell me more about the dodo.”

“Women have made men so ineffectual that they are extinct! What man is master in his own home anymore? Even a physics bunker is not safe from women! Women are taking over!”

“That's a load of crap, Kurt, and you know it! You're manufacturing reasons you think will sidetrack me, and they won't. I want to know the real reason for being a dodo.”

“Yes, you are intelligent. I have always known that, but never as positively as I do tonight. Why do you waste yourself on a police career? It is vulgar.”

“You're a snob, Kurt, you couldn't understand. I don't
waste
myself—it's the stepping stone to a public career that could take me to the White House if I wanted. The problem is that I don't think I want that. What I know is that the Dodo can make me famous, win me decorations and a lot of media exposure.”

He looked incredulous. “You truly believe you will win?”

Her eyelids lowered, she sneered. “I know I'll win.”

The chain made a dull, clunking noise as he brushed his hand across it. “Trussed up like a dodo? Like an unbelievably stupid, ugly bird? You cannot win, Helen. In a few hours you will be as dead as a dodo.” He tittered. “I am like the Pope, I am infallible!”

He began pinching, poking, punching and squeezing her flesh; she had to endure it without making the slightest noise, or he would gag her. Whatever happened, she must keep her mouth free! It was her best, her only weapon.

His erection had grown huge; twice he fitted its tip against her entrance and she stiffened, but on each occasion he muttered something in German and positioned himself away from the bed, muttering in German, staring at her.

“You can get it up, but can't you get it in?” she asked.

“Stupid! Of course I can—if I want to. But the question is, do I want to? I like probing you better.”

“I bet you do!” she said. “It's more disgusting.”

“Hasten slowly,” he said in her ear, applying tape to her mouth. “You must be silenced whenever I am not in the room. Good for me that you have a new apartment—no one will visit you.” And he flipped her over on to her stomach.

Wriggling desperately to turn over again, she reviewed all her options. She could bite his rubber glove to shreds, but if she did—no. He wouldn't leave a fingerprint, he was too smart, and he might kill her in a rage. She had to reach her gun, and in order to do that, she had to talk. Talk constantly herself and keep him talking. Talk and her gun were her best options.

Eating a slice of cold pizza, he strolled in.

“Look at you! You've turned yourself back again, you clever little dodo! Well, no matter! Why do young American women starve themselves? Their refrigerators are empty. Cottage cheese … Diet this and diet that. I was amazed to find half a pizza in your refrigerator, but it is on its last day of edibility. Don't you like my big words? You, Helen, are a tough bird. Your every movement tells me that you will not easily succumb to terror.”

He finished the pizza. “Lie there and think of death while I find a book that can teach me a new word or phrase—how I love that!—and entertain me as I wait.”

The books! Her eyes followed him as he walked toward her study, where three thousand books lined its walls. When he came back, he held a book she couldn't identify.
Take off the tape
!

He tore the tape off and sat down in a white velvet chair.

“What's the book, Kurt?”

“H. Rider Haggard.
King Solomon's Mines
,” he answered. “I greatly esteem Victorian and Edwardian novels, provided that they are of the adventurous kind,” he said, apparently not averse to more talk. “The prose is excellent and the subject matter lurid. I have found that there is always an example of the genre on the shelves of a bookish woman, and I am not interested in women who are not bookish.”

“What would you do if you didn't find an example of the genre?”

He laughed. “That cannot happen. I pay several visits to a woman's apartment to check her out.”

“You haven't been in this apartment before.”

“Ah, but many times in Talisman Towers!”

“I've changed a lot of things, Kurt.”

He opened the book and started to read while Helen continued trying to free her hands, safely hidden behind her back. These, she had realized, were her own cuffs, though the ones connected by a chain on her ankles were his. The Commissioner had taken some of these cuffs as an experiment, for the salesman claimed they tightened the more the prisoner struggled. Helen had been issued a pair to try on Nick and Delia, who soon learned how to immobilize the ratchet. So did Helen.

Kurt the Dodo had put the cuffs on quite efficiently, but hadn't pushed them cruelly tight, perhaps because he wanted the focus of her pain to be what he did to her.

Her joints were slim and supple, her willpower immense. Pray that her book continued to hold his attention! The short chain held her hands close together; she grasped the fingers of her right hand with her left, clustered them, moved her left hand up to her right's knuckles, then crushed them until her right hand was nearly as small as its wrist. Oh, the pain! The cuff slid off. Easier to work her imprisoned left hand, a little larger, with the right one liberated; closing her mind to the pain, she forced its knuckles through the cuff and now was completely free. She was in the middle of the bed, what seemed a day's journey from the pillow, but she made herself lie ostensibly still and worked her way across the bed a millimeter at a time, so slowly that his peripheral vision saw no movement. The book was holding his interest, but if he turned to look at her, she was caught—her position had definitely changed.

She was petrified, understanding that this was her only chance at winning. From the moment when he had stood forth in all the glory of his alter ego, he had cast her into paroxysms of fear. Cold and dark as outer space, he was a creature inhabiting a lightless human body, obsessed with the spectacle of terror and the ecstasy of someone else's suffering.

But her fear was not for her own torture and death. It was terror that she might fail. She couldn't fail, she couldn't!

“Do you take the rests so that you can get it up again?” she asked, interrupting his concentration.

He looked up, startled, and, as she had hoped, didn't notice how far she had moved.

“Even you cannot inspire me to frenzy,” he said, sneering.

“Have you ever achieved orgasm?”

A look of horrified prudery came over his face. “Disgusting! You are disgusting! Things like that are not your business!”

“What utter crap! Do you come, Kurt?”

Now he was really angry, past noticing that she was moving.

“Immoral! You are immoral!”

A few more inches. Nearly there, nearly there …

He rose from the white velvet chair and stormed toward the bed, face contorted in fury; it was then that Helen saw the silenced .22 on the bedside table next to him. But it was her advantage. Even as she twisted her body up to a sitting position while he, astounded, gaped at her, Helen's hand came up holding her gun, safety off, round in the chamber. She shot him in the right chest. He leaped backward to sprawl on the fluffy white floor, staring up at her as the pink bubbles gathered on his lips.

“You're going to be as dead as a dodo, Kurt,” she said, swinging her legs on to the carpet well clear of the growing, wet red stain. “Can you still speak?”

He tried, but coughed instead; his hands flailed.

“Afraid of dying, Kurt?”

That provoked extreme agitation. “This is an excellent apartment, quite sound-proof,” she said in a relaxed, chatty voice. “No one will hear my gun as anything except far-off backfires. I will call the police, of course. When I feel like it. I'm going to make you suffer first. A gut shot. My, it will hurt!”