“Role playing games,” Milla inserted, “I know that.”
“Apparently he likes the character Beast from X-Men, that fits perfectly with our theory that he thinks of himself as some sort of beast.”
“He definitely sounds like a viable suspect; hopefully, we get something concrete when we’re talking to him.”
Dante hoped so. The killer they were looking for was already starting the downward slide and beginning to devolve. The time between kills was already shortening and would continue to until they caught him.
What he really wanted was to figure out the killer’s endgame. If they could figure out exactly what it was that he hoped to achieve, they would stand a better chance at getting ahead of him.
“Here we are,” he said as he pulled the car over to the side of the road in front of a pretty white colonial. The garden was beautifully manicured, already beginning to burst into a patchwork of spring color. It didn’t look like the kind of place that was harboring a dangerous killer.
“You said he lived in the basement, right?”
“Right.”
“We should go straight there then, bypass the parents. They look like the kind of people who probably have a lawyer on speed dial.”
That sounded smart.
The gate was unlocked, and they walked inside. A path went along the side of the house and they headed down it and found a short flight of stairs heading down to a door.
Assuming it was the basement, they rapped on the door.
It was opened a solid minute later by a groggy looking man with a big bushy beard and bloodshot eyes.
“Trake Powell?” he asked.
“Yeah,” came the sleepy reply. “Who’re you?”
“I’m Detective Delamarre, and this is my partner, Detective Lindsay. We need to ask you a few questions.”
The man shrugged but looked nervous as he let them into the apartment. The basement did not look like the outside of the house. It was a pigsty down here. There were clothes everywhere and empty soda bottles and candy wrappers; dirty dishes were piled all over the kitchenette counters. For someone as OCD about cleanliness as he was, this place made him want to take a shower immediately.
Looking through the dirtiness, his eyes zeroed in on the table where there sat at least a dozen sets of fake teeth.
“You like to dress up, Trake?” he asked.
Following his eyes, the man shrugged. “I make them for people. For comic cons.”
“You don’t have a set for yourself?” Milla asked.
The nervous shudder said he did.
“You like dressing up, Trake? You like pretending you’re a beast?” he asked.
“Sometimes I’ll dress up,” he acknowledged.
“When you make your after-hour trips to the library,” Dante pushed. He wanted a confession. If he couldn’t get one, then he would take confiscating the teeth on the table and matching them to the bite marks on the victims.
“I don’t go to the library at night,” Trake protested, fairly lamely.
“We believe that you do,” Milla contradicted.
“You abduct librarians, you take them out to the woods, and you maul them like the beast you pretend to be, leaving the bodies there to be discovered by people out walking their dogs or jogging,” he hammered at the man, watching Trake shudder before him.
“I-I never killed anyone,” the man stuttered.
“Oh, no?” Milla asked.
“You didn’t kill Kim Johnson or Kelly Mac or Teresa Mateo?” Dante asked, pulling crime scene photos from the file in his hand. “You didn’t do this to them?”
Trake took one look at the photos of the mangled bodies and promptly threw up, ruining any hopes he’d had that they had finally found their man.
12:44 A.M.
* * *
All day, Sydney had been thinking about the murders.
Who was going to be next?
What if it was one of her colleagues?
What if it was her?
That thought had followed her all day at work yesterday, then gone home with her. It had been there when she’d had dinner with her parents, and was still right there in the forefront of her mind when she got into bed. It had consumed her dreams, giving her horrible nightmares where she was running from a killer, and it had been the first thing she thought about when she woke up this morning.
Now she was at work, and again, all she could think about was what if the killer wasn’t done. What if he came here next?
She’d never had anything to do with a crime before. She came from a nice family, they all worked hard. Neither she nor any of her siblings had had any troubles with the law as kids. And she worked in a library. None of her friends were criminal types. The only time she had ever spoken to a police officer was when she had returned home from picking up her little sister from a party to find her street filled with police cars and fire trucks.
The night she’d learned that her husband was dead.
It was weird; she both remembered the night as clearly as though she were watching it play out right in front of her, and yet, at the same time, the whole night was one great big blur.
It hadn’t been until she got out of her car that she realized it was her house that was on fire. She had scanned the crowd gathered in the road, expecting to see her husband standing amongst them.
But she hadn’t.
Because he hadn’t made it out of the house alive.
Sydney remembered being held back by a firefighter as she tried to get inside the house to find her husband. She remembered the cops coming to her and sitting her down in the middle of the street and breaking the news to her. She remembered screaming and crying. She remembered the helplessness she felt and the huge gaping sense of emptiness. She remembered her family turning up, holding her, hugging her, wiping away her tears, trying to make her feel better when her heart had just died.
Time hadn’t taken away that pain, but it had dulled it a little.
Enough that she was now at the point that she wanted to find that kind of love again.
She was afraid it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
Could you have more than one soul mate?
Mitch was hers and she still loved him as much today as she did the day that they’d first met.
Sydney didn’t know if it was possible to love another person the way she had loved Mitch. He had been the first great love of her life. Attempting to move on was hard because it meant leaving a piece of Mitch behind, and it meant acknowledging that not only was he no longer in her life but that he was never going to be in it again.
But she was ready.
She really was.
“Hi, Sydney.”
She blinked at the voice, startled. She’d forgotten that she was at work and had been sitting with a stack of books she was supposed to be cataloguing and staring into space for who knew how long.
“Oh, hi, Ed,” she said awkwardly when she saw who was hovering beside her. Ed came to the library every single day. Every. Single. Day. She didn’t know what his job was, or really what he came here for. He spent a lot of time in the comic section, and the rest of his time hitting on her. She couldn’t explain why, but the guy creeped her out.
“How are you today?” he asked, shuffling nervously from foot to foot.
“Fine, thank you,” she replied, looking about for one of her colleagues. They knew that the guy made her uncomfortable, and one of them would usually come and rescue her, but right now, she didn’t see anyone. She was on her own.