Twisted Hunger (15 page)

Unable to verbalize such an impossible wish, he merely nodded again then made a croaking sound when she pulled the robe away from her breast and directed the nipple to his mouth. As though he were starving to death, he attacked her offering. She quickly gave him direction, even showing him how to use his hand to prepare her other breast while he suckled.

She let him enjoy the treat for quite a while then gently eased him away. “I think you should take off the rest of my lingerie now, dear.”

He flushed with embarrassment. He had forgotten what he was wearing. A bit clumsily, he took off the brassiere and suddenly became aware of his blatant erection. He quickly covered himself with his hands.

She smiled and moved his hands away. “There’s no need to be ashamed, my darling. You have a very fine cock for such a young man. Why, if your father saw it, he’d be terribly jealous. He might even whip you to try to prove that he’s more of a man, but he’s a eunuch compared to you.”

His muscle twitched involuntarily, making his face redden a bit more.

She stroked the impudent appendage with her index finger, up and down the length before circling it from base to tip. “Oh yes. I wish your father was this long and thick. Actually, I just wish your father could get this hard. But he has never been much of a man in the bedroom.” Her head lowered a bit and she gently blew a warm breath over his cock. “I really should send you back to your room now, but you’d have a bit of trouble putting your clothes back on like this, wouldn’t you?”

Her hand fully enveloped him and slid the foreskin up and down, causing a drop of wetness to appear. “Oh dear, now see what I’ve done. Tell me, my darling, when you masturbate, do you ever pretend that your hand is a woman’s mouth?”

He swallowed hard and nodded once more.

“Oh, my darling, you are so precious. My precious, precious jewel.” She gently urged him to lie back on the carpet and positioned herself between his thighs. “Now I feel terrible about giving you such a hard spanking when you were just dealing with teenage hormones. I must do something to make up for that. I want to show you how much I truly love you.” She gazed deeply into his pretty blue eyes then surrounded his big cock with her wet mouth. Within seconds his cum spurted down the back of her throat, but she continued to suck, keeping him hard and ready for more.

“Oh Mommy, I love you more than anything!”

Grazing his sensitized flesh with her teeth, she slowly pulled her mouth away. “I’ve shown you how much I love you, my darling. Now it’s your turn to show me.” His eyes revealed his confusion as Vivian repositioned herself to mount him. “Don’t worry, my sweet, I’ll show you what I need you to do.”

His bewilderment turned to ecstasy as her hot pussy swallowed his entire erection in one smooth movement.

Teddy had never enjoyed giving up his virginity more.

Chapter 9

Luke motioned for the waitress to refill his cup. Terrell and Maria had suggested they meet in the hotel’s coffee shop for breakfast before heading back home, but so far they hadn’t surfaced. It didn’t really matter. He had nowhere to rush to.

“Would you like to see a section of the paper while you’re waiting for your friends?” the waitress asked as she poured steaming coffee into his cup.

“That would be great,” Luke replied with a smile.

She handed him the regional news and business and finance sections. “I’m afraid by this time Sunday morning, the paper’s been pretty well picked over. This was all I could find that was still in fairly good shape.”

“It’ll be fine. Thank you.” Luke immediately noticed a story on the front news page about last night’s fundraiser. A few of the bigger names were dropped, and the AIDS research project director was quoted at length. Like everyone else last night, the reporter was clearly in Jones’ corner and quite certain he would soon be in the White House.

Hoping to find some mention of the senator’s lovely aide, he turned to the inside page where the article continued and discovered that a doodler had gotten there before him. There was a large photograph of Senator Jones shaking hands with gay rights activist Gregory Yates. On the other side of Yates was the senator’s look-alike brother. The anonymous artist had altered the photo so that the senator appeared to be a pirate and his brother and Yates were now sporting women’s hairdos and makeup. Across the top of the picture the doodler had inked the words “true love”. It was so well done, Luke had to read the caption to be certain that it was them.

He tried to read the conclusion of the article, but his eyes kept returning to the doctored photo. Something about it was giving him a déjà vu sort of feeling. Rather than ignore it, he studied the picture until the explanation hit him like a balloon popping in his head.

The feminized Theodore Jones looked eerily similar to the police artist’s rendering of the psycho whore as she would look today.

He felt the coffee sour in his stomach and recalled the queasy sensation he’d gotten when he’d looked into Jones’ eyes last night. He wondered now if he might have gotten the same strange feeling from the brother if that man had ever raised his head and looked directly at him, or if he had not been so distracted by the stuttering.

“Sorry we’re late,” Terrell said as he and Maria sat down across from Luke. “We, uh, overslept.”

Maria arched an eyebrow at him. “Is
that
what they call it now?” When she realized Luke wasn’t laughing, she touched his hand. “You’re not mad at us, are you?”

He blinked at her. “Huh? Oh, no. I was— My mind was somewhere else. Terrell, look at this.” He folded the newspaper and turned it for him to get a good look at the photo.

Terrell shrugged. “Everybody’s entitled to an opinion.”

Luke tapped the paper. “Look again. Doesn’t it remind you of another sketch you saw the other day?”

Terrell rubbed his bloodshot eyes and frowned at the picture. A few seconds later he figured out what Luke was implying. “Whoa, cowboy. You definitely don’t want to go there. And especially not now.” His eyes quickly darted toward Maria and back.

“What is it?” she asked, leaning forward to judge the photo for herself.

“Just another homophobe’s idea of a joke,” Terrell said and pushed the paper toward Luke with another meaningful look.

He got the message. Terrell thought he was nuts and Maria was not to be let in on their secret. He would have to keep his thoughts to himself until they were back at Terrell’s. Before they left the restaurant, however, Maria excused herself to go to the ladies’ room and Luke swiftly took advantage of her absence.

“Didn’t you see the similarity in the pictures?”

Terrell rolled his eyes. “What I see is a crazy man sitting in front of me.”

Luke shook his head. “I didn’t tell you last night, but when I met the senator, I had the weirdest feeling I’d seen him before. And his brother is almost a dead ringer for him.”

Terrell snorted. “Even if he gave you cold sweats, what do you think you’d do about it? Walk up to the man and ask him when’s the last time he dressed up like a hooker, committed murder and took the eyes home as a souvenir? Anyway, I might remind you that you’re the guy who has sworn all along that the killer was a woman.”

“I know, I know. But the other day, the police artist asked me if I was absolutely certain about that. He said there was something about the jawline that seemed masculine. Maybe I only thought I saw breasts and—”

“Yeah, and maybe you only thought the senator looked familiar because he’s been staring at you off the cover of half a dozen different magazines. Look, I know what you’re going through. I’ve done it myself on occasion. You want to catch the bad guy so desperately, you start imagining he’s right in front of you. All you have to do is point at him and he’ll confess. Believe me, it doesn’t work that way.

“Listen to me, Luke, it’s like I told you before. There’s nothing more you can do here. Visit your parents or whatever else you feel like you have to do, then go home… before you start accusing
me
of looking like the killer.”

Luke saw Maria returning, so he didn’t argue with that statement, but he tore out the photo and put it in his pocket for further discussion later.

Because Terrell and Maria were so tired, Luke did most of the driving back to L.A. while they napped. It gave him a chance to think about what his eyes and stomach had told him.

Jones’ face on the covers of magazines hadn’t triggered any strange ideas, but he had seen firsthand how different the man looked in person. Besides that, until recently, he had always made a concerted effort not to consciously think about what he’d seen in that alley. He had not wanted to find her.

It was only the other night that he’d considered the possibility that she was not a prostitute but a mistress of disguises. Now it appeared that he also had to consider the possibility that she was not even a she but a he. Could the whore’s breasts have been an optical illusion, created by the shadows or some special apparel like a padded push-up bra? Could the choker around her neck have been hiding a protruding Adam’s apple that might have revealed the killer’s true gender?

Theodore Jones was not a large man. Perhaps his Adam’s apple wasn’t that obvious to begin with.

The most important question, however, was, did he actually believe the brother of a popular California senator was a cross-dressing, psychopathic killer?

Terrell was right, of course. The idea was preposterous. No one crazy enough to commit multiple gruesome murders could hide his insanity from his publicity-minded brother for so many years.

Unless the brother knew the truth and helped to hide the ugly family secret… which could explain why the senator took his brother with him everywhere he went.

No, that angle really was too far-fetched to work in any scenario.

His mind pulled up names of infamous serial killers whose families and neighbors insisted they were really nice men. Hadn’t Ted Bundy been considered charming by all those women he murdered? Wasn’t it possible that The Eye Doctor had never been caught because he was hiding in plain sight, right behind someone in a public position? Wasn’t it possible that he might avoid suspicion even if he was found ten feet from a dead body with the eyeballs in his hand? He had a recollection that something like that was suggested about Jack the Ripper.

Luke had his arguments and questions well-rehearsed by the time he and Terrell were alone late that night. “All I’m asking is that you have an open mind about it. There are a few grains of sense here. Anyone smart enough to outfox the FBI experts all these years could be smart enough to fool the public. Then there’s the matter of all the different times and places that the murders occurred. Maybe, instead of the killer being a transient and moving from big city to big city over the years, he traveled around under the cover of his brother’s profession. The senator has often used his close relationship with his brother to exemplify his stance on the importance of family values. Plus, didn’t you say that the statistics suggested that California could be a home base?”

Terrell ran his hand through his hair, clearly frustrated with Luke’s refusal to drop the matter. “I also said the base was probably Los Angeles. If you’re going to take that route, it would make more sense to pick on one of the movie stars that were at the banquet last night.”

“But none of them gave me the feeling that I’d met them face-to-face before and had reason to be afraid of them.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, but I’m too tired to keep coming back with logical answers. Let’s both get some sleep and if you still want to talk about it tomorrow, we’ll review everything all over again.”

There was too much going on in Luke’s head for him to think about sleep, but it wasn’t fair to keep Terrell awake when he had to work tomorrow. “Okay. Just answer one, no two, questions for me.”

“Fine,” Terrell said with a look of exasperation. “Two questions.”

Luke leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Has Senator Jones ever before asked to meet the detective handling a particular Los Angeles homicide or offered suggestions about its solution?”

Terrell narrowed his eyes. “No, but the case does have a connection to his platform, if homophobia is involved. Was that one question or two?”

“One. This is the second. If you were the one who came up with the idea that Theodore Jones might be The Eye Doctor, what would be your next step as a homicide detective?”