I wanted to shake him. I wanted that temper, that control, to explode.
“Are you suicidal?” he asked, breaking our silence. Interested but not concerned. Probing but not urgent. He was asking the question as if he were observing me for science more than anything else. Like he didn’t overtly care what the answer was. Like he didn’t care about me.
It was refreshing.
“No,” I said, after considering it. I knew why he was asking this question. I was surprised he hadn’t asked sooner. He got the details of things. Of me. So likely, he would’ve noticed my ankle hadn’t been hurt enough to explain me lying in the cold for hours. No head wounds. No limbs severed. I’d considered why I hadn’t fought harder every day. “Not suicidal. Just…tired.” It was the first time I’d admitted that. Weakness.
“Too tired to get up and limp back to your house?”
Again, curious, not worried. Not like he was going to offer to talk it out with me or put me in some kind of facility with locked doors and little cups of pills.
I shrugged. “I guess, at the time I must’ve been.”
I waited. For more. For questions. For assumptions. For judgment.
Nothing came.
My head was throbbing, the space behind my left eye the worst. Even though I made millions describing things—and doing it really fucking well, if I did say so myself—I was always at a loss to explain the depth of that pain. The blazing hot knife digging through my skull, the dull ache that turned into a throb. I had been convinced for a while it was a brain tumor.
I tended to think things like this.
Diagnose myself with the help of my computer and an internet connection. Hours lost over trying to match up my symptoms with a terminal illness. I hadn’t died of any of these illnesses I spent too much time convinced I was suffering from, but that didn’t dissuade me. Life had taught me the worst did, and could, happen to me. I didn’t have the luxury of stupidity or naiveté to think it wouldn’t happen to me.
Though I didn’t go to a doctor.
Didn’t go that far.
I was happy to drive myself into faint hysteria and then eventually forget about what I was meant to be dying of.
This particular ailment hasn’t disappeared like the others. Though it could be due to the eye strain of staring at a computer for seven hours, combined with dehydration, caffeine overuse, and the whisky from last night.
Last night.
The reason for all of the words staring back at me. Accusing me of something. Of using a man to fuel my passion. Leaning on someone else to create. But I brushed that off. He might’ve helped spark something, inspire something, but he wasn’t the one dehydrated, tired, drained, and dealing with a splitting migraine. No, I created this story. Which was what it was turning into now.
A story.
It was going to be my best.
I knew that.
Although I couldn’t say that out loud.
Though I wasn’t superstitious, it seemed like a bit of a bad omen to announce something like that to the universe. Plus, I didn’t need to make any announcements; the book was going to speak for itself.
It was going to speak for a lot. Including the victims of this serial killer. Most notably, the serial killer himself. Of course, I couldn’t know whether or not he would be caught by the time my book was published. That wasn’t going to be for at least another year, so the odds were not in his favor. It was hard to get away with murder these days.
But then again, clicking through various news articles that were open on my computer, it had only just broken there was a connection between his murders. And it hadn’t even hit national news yet. Mostly, it was a few independent online news publications, veering ever so slightly to the left. There were some more murmuring on Twitter. I predicted the story would really break whenever the next woman was killed.
As it was, the body count was already at five. But six turned out to be the lucky number. Not for whoever was number six though.
My pet detective had been helpful with his information. Though, he hadn’t been feeling so helpful when it became apparent I wasn’t going to be sleeping with him, or coming back to New York anytime soon. Which was fine with me, since I got what I wanted from him.
So far, he’d killed woman in their thirties. Successful but not wealthy. Comfortable. Pretty in a wholesome kind of way. Different hair colors, but all petite. Whether that was a choice based on what he wanted from that or just because it was easier to overpower them. That could mean he wasn’t physically strong, which was highly likely, since most serial killers were compensating for things. Ways they were lacking. They wanted power they wouldn’t have unless they were torturing and murdering young women.
The women weren’t sexually assaulted. Which, I guessed, was a small blessing for them at least. Then again, they were tortured for hours before he finally killed them. So, blessings had well and truly abandoned them.
No evidence was left at the scene.
No fingerprints, hairs, fluids. One of the women had defensive wounds, skin under her fingernails, but whoever he was wasn’t in the system.
So, he’d been a good little boy until he finally snapped.
None of the rest had shown any signs of fight. All were killed in their own homes. No forced entry. All had let their killer in.
I gazed out the window.
Where most of the house was designed to have unobstructed views of the lake, this little guestroom faced the driveway.
You only knew how to find the driveway if you knew where you were going. Knowledge of the area. And you could hear someone driving up, nature didn’t like being disturbed. I had a feeling Emily would’ve left her doors unlocked, as I had gotten in the habit of doing.
Regardless of that, if he had driven up, she would’ve had plenty of time to call for help if she’d felt threatened, which she didn’t. Until it was too late.
Otherwise, he would’ve come through the woods. Again, he would’ve had to have been familiar with them. Confident or insane enough to come in broad daylight, since Emily’s estimated TOD was between two and three in the afternoon.
She had no chemicals in her system, and despite her many, many injuries, nothing to indicate she’d been knocked out.
So, I guessed the killer had a friendly, non-threatening face and physique, enough charisma to get him as far as he needed to go, and some obviously deep-rooted psychologic issues.
I used all of this. But added in a supernatural sickness that infected him, awakening deep, violent desires he might or might not have acted on. The moral ground on which I was standing was nonexistent at this point, but that would worry me later, after the book was done, published, and out of my hands.
Or maybe it wouldn’t.
I was interested to see this play out. Whether more women would perish. I didn’t want them to. This wasn’t in my control. I would watch, though. Rapt. With a sick fascination I was certainly going to hell for feeding.
Something jerked me outward. A prickling at the back of my neck that was nothing to do inspiration and everything to do with instinct.
Someone was watching me.
I was certain my Glock was out of my desk drawer, safety off, before I even properly looked in the direction of the window.
There was nothing there.
My car sat in the driveway, empty.
The woods crowded the small road, nestling it. The gaps between the trees were wide enough for a human to walk through, if they so wished. But there was no one standing there. That I could see. And I had to trust my eyes because I was so deep in this story it wasn’t out of the question that I would start seeing things.