Sins of the Flash

by David Niall Wilson

  Cherie felt it as well as he did, and she moved with it. She tilted her head, spun her hips, and lost herself in his eyes as he slid them across her skin and searched her soul. She followed the invisible puppet strings in his fingers as though he owned her.

  Christian wondered fleetingly how he had ever had problems with models before. There was so much he hadn't known. It didn't matter. They would still have ruined his work. It was not Christian that was flawed. The drugs shouldn't be necessary; the sexual tension was a distraction. He had to be strong and maintain his vision.

  He sat her on the edge of the bed, opened his satchel, and removed the makeup case. Cherie watched him, eyes wide and interested, eager. As he worked, he gestured again at the vial and raised an eyebrow questioningly. She moved without hesitation, and he felt it again, the undercurrent of shame in at her need easily overpowered by the bite of her addiction.

  He waited patiently as she repeated her performance with the mirror, blade, and dollar bill, watched her muscles ripple beneath the tight material of her blouse. The light from the room's one dim lamp danced through the highlights of her hair. She finished quickly and glanced up at him again with an easy, sleepy smile. Christian sat down beside her, opened his case, and framed her face in his hands again.

  "Don't move," he instructed her, reaching down for the cleansing pads and the cold cream.

  "But...my makeup?"

  "Is very attractive," he finished, dabbing the cold cream softly onto her cheek, "but not quite appropriate for what we are trying to achieve here. You just sit still, let me do this and we'll just be a minute. I may be a man," he smiled at her, "but there are a few things I can do with makeup that I think you’ll like. Relax, and you won't be disappointed."

  She fell silent, leaned back slightly and closed her eyes. Christian leaned very close, working deftly, laying a basecoat and then detailing, eyebrow pencils, mascara, just the slightest hint of blush. He wanted to draw out the little girl in her features, but he wanted the cheap, tawdry look of the streets as well. He would have to be very precise to achieve the proper balance.

  It wasn't as easy as one of the porcelain masks. Cherie’s skin, though smooth and unlined, was softer, rougher in texture. It was more difficult to achieve the continuity of his lines, the subtle blends of hue that accented one another across the palette. As he worked, he smiled, humming a song under his breath.

  Then the unexpected happened. Cherie moved. It was subtle at first, only the gentlest touch of her skin, brushing against him. It began with a casual sweep of her fingers, perhaps a mistake. Then she arched, and there was the taut tip of her nipple, the soft fabric of her blouse, sliding against him, pressing into his skin as he worked.

  Next her hands returned more insistently. The desire that flooded him was instantaneous and powerful. Cherie felt him stiffen in her grasp, and giggled.

  "We have all night," she whispered, drawing her face closer and smearing the makeup in a lurid stripe across her brow. She giggled again and melted into his arms.

  Christian had no defense against such an assault, no will to defy her. She pushed him back, then lost her balance and rolled across him, pressing the length of her flesh against his as she did and smothering him in the scent of her perfume.

  His mind instantly conjured his mother's face and replaced Cherie’s sweet, floral scent with that of heavy musk. He growled softly and let his hands stray to her blouse. He tugged it up and off over her head, hopelessly smudging the makeup he’d spent such care applying.

  He rolled her to her side, and rose to gaze at her from the height of his arms, then slid over her and pressed down into her flesh. She lifted her torso from the bed and helped him slide her skirt down over her hips. The room swirled, and Christian lost himself in her, only vaguely aware of his surroundings. His mother’s voice rose to whisper to him, but he pressed her back with vicious, grinding thrusts of his hips, and she grew silent.

  Christian's heart, mind, and body were wrung dry. He lay atop her when he was spent and let his surroundings come back into focus. He saw the light on the dresser first. Focusing on it, he slid his gaze to the side and he saw his camera bag – his satchel. He raised himself on his elbows and looked about the room.

  There were articles of clothing and bed sheets everywhere. Two of the pillows lay on the floor, and Cherie lay beside him, softly fondling herself and watching him through sleepy eyes. Her expression had a lost, vacant quality. Stoned, he realized. She was stoned out of her mind.

  He rose from the bed and dressed, watching her carefully. He searched each movement, each shift of her expression, for the qualities he sought in his masterpiece. They were there, buried more deeply now and layered in a fresh coat of depravity, but still there.

  He finished dressing, grabbed the vial and turned back to the satchel. It was time to get to the work at hand before another opportunity was lost.

  Christian slipped the Coke into the bag and drew forth a second vial. This one, like the other, held Cocaine, but there was a difference. The contents of this one were pure and uncut, enough to put a horse out of its misery. He turned with a wicked grin on his face and brought her the vial, handing her also her mirror and implements.

  "I want you to have a good time," he told her, sitting beside her on the bed. His mind flickered back across the days to Gates' comment. They both wanted her to have a good time.

  "You have a bit more of this, and then we have work to do. You enjoy yourself a little more, and I'll set up the lights. Then we'll get you ready, eh?"

  She nodded dreamily, her gaze once more locked onto the white powder. Before she had even managed to sit up, she was reaching for the mirror and blade.

  Christian shook off the haze that had shaded his thoughts and moved around the room, setting a tripod here with three lights, a clip on lamp above the dresser. Each had to be placed just so, and he’d lost time.

  He took out the backdrop he'd planned for her, blue velvet to set off her blonde highlights, pink borders and ruffles to enhance the innocence he sought, the perfection of her image.

  He had planned on a few shots of her clothed before moving on to the nudes, but that was obviously out of the question now, so he improvised, running images through his mind, processing them, changing settings on his camera as he went and adjusting the lights again and again.

  On the bed behind him he heard the first sniff of the drug finding its mark, and he turned to watch her. The Cocaine would hit fast, so Gates had said, and he wanted to see the seductive drug become the violent lover, the terminal lover. He wanted to see the arch of her body as the thing she most wanted ended her need and finished off her craving.

  Cherie was weaving a little, but still determined, wanting that last grain of Cocaine, even though she must have known she was nearly unconscious.

  Without stopping to think, Christian leapt to his camera, focused quickly, and snapped off a series of shots, moving to the floor and angling up into the empty pools that had been her eyes, focusing on the powder caked around her nostrils, on her lips. She keeled over to one side, and he moved to her, taking the last of the powder from the mirror and putting it on his fingertip. He ran the finger between her lips and over her tongue. She swallowed once, coughed, and then licked her lips a final time before rolling onto her back.

  She was gone. Her body twitched several times. Christian watched her breasts as they wobbled limply from side to side, then became still. He laid his hand softly on one of them, rubbing the nipple between his thumb and forefinger idly, but there was no response. He looked down at the camera in his hand, and he smiled. He'd been quicker this time. It was not a lost image, merely a last one.

  Satisfied, he rose, retrieved the half-spilled makeup kit, and set to work. He only had a couple of hours remaining until daylight, and he had to be long gone by then. He hadn't planned on distraction, he'd only been thinking of the girl as an image to be captured.

  Cherie wasn't very heavy, and Christian had little trouble posit
ioning her. She was a mannequin, a play-doll model that would bend to his every whim. He set her against the blue velvet drop cloth carefully, arranged her limbs and brushed her hair. Then he cleaned and made up her face.

  She could have been the girl next door that every man dreamed of, sexy, provocative, without a clue. The only differences were the makeup and the eyes. She was beyond men now, a vision to be sought, a dream to share with oneself at night, but never to be attained. Death lent her a far away, ethereal beauty she had lacked in life.

  Christian moved about the room, taking shots from different angles, some pristine, some bordering on pornographic. In a couple he set her blouse back over her, wrapping dead fingers around the cloth to hold it in place demurely, in others he spread her limbs wide and placed her thumb between her lips, her tongue lolling across it and her head slung back – lurid, wanton, and inaccessible.

  When he was satisfied that he'd done all he could and that there was nothing more to be drawn from the moment, he began his second task, the task set him by Hiram Gates. He ran over the details carefully in his mind as he worked, his practical, logical self taking over, as it did in his downtown studio, performing mechanically and precisely.

  "If the police want another psycho," Gates had said, "Give them one. If the girls are going to die anyway, let’s give the papers something to scream about. They have no way of coming back on you, Christian, but we have got to give them something to chase."

  It made sense. Christian didn't like it, didn't like the feel of the thing, but it made sense. If he didn't want to be the hunted, he had to provide them with someone else to hunt. It wasn’t the same as the photographs, but it was an art.

  The central element to Gates' solution was a poem the man had concocted. It was to be smeared on the mirror of the room in Cherie's own lipstick, but Christian modified the vision to suit himself. He would use the lipstick she was wearing now. It was more artistic.

  On her lips it was soft and lustrous, but on the mirror he knew how it would look; it would be cheap and lewd, out of control. The way she had ended up. The way she had wanted to end up, though for all his soul Christian couldn't fathom why.

  He worked quickly, leaving the drop cloth in place and dropping an empty film canister in the corner. He had to be certain they would put together the photo angle, that they would know it was the same person as the first time. If he wanted to lead them away from his doorstep, he needed to make the image complete. They already had the developing fluid, so if he didn’t want them to pinpoint a professional photo artist, he had to give them an artist of a different kind to seek.

  The rest of his equipment he put back in the bag and the satchel, leaving out only the first vial, the regular-strength Cocaine. He slipped it into Cherie’s purse after wiping it carefully in case his prints were on it. It didn’t matter that they found his prints, only that they not find them on the drugs.

  When he was ready to leave, he took the lipstick dispenser and set to work, making the letters flamboyant and striking. The script was not at all like his personal scrawl. He found this all nearly as exciting as he had the woman. He also found that he was enjoying this new image, this vision he was creating. He could picture himself as the man who left poetry on mirrors and took women when he wanted them. He wrote:

  "I had her white, I had her black,

  I had her on her naked back,

  I drugged her up and in the sack,

  Now, is she live, or just Kodak?"

  The verse was childish and pointless, but he wrote it just as Gates had given it to him. The very idea that it was nothing like Christian himself would have created added to the deception. It was an image he was after, not a masterpiece. The poem was only one, gaudy addition, one piece in the puzzle he scattered about.

  He stood back and studied his handiwork. It looked like something from a horror movie, but very real.

  "You don't want them to think the psycho is smart," Gates had said. "You want them to think he'll be easy to catch, that he's snapping. It will infuriate them when they fail. They'll have every porno pirate and shutterbug loony in for questioning within the hour. They'll have them back on the streets in another one. Nothing there to find, and they end up nowhere near you, and nowhere near me."

  Christian glanced around at Cherie once more. His emotional link with her had drained away and transferred itself to the film. She was an object, a still life, and a compliant rag-doll. There was no animation in her curves, no vitality in her eyes. Nothing. He had drawn it out, like a psychic vampire, stolen her innocence, her lust, and her need. She was an empty shell, and she was still beautiful.

  He left the room and locked the door to gain extra time with the cleaning woman in the morning. Then he turned and slipped off down the hall. Gates had arranged for a back door to be open slightly, held by a small block of wood. No witnesses to his departure.

  It was exciting and very clandestine. His mother would have approved, he thought, maybe for the first time in his life. It was so much like something she might have done, or something she might have wanted to do.

  Christian stepped into the alley behind the hotel and out to the street. He looked both way and saw nothing. He made it to his car without seeing a soul and slipped behind the wheel.

  As he closed his door and reached over to put the key in the ignition, he heard sirens. They barreled through the night, racing toward him at breakneck speed, and the air was alive with the flashing of lights, the roar of engines, and the squeal of tires.

  Christian clung to the steering wheel, his eyes wide and staring, his fingers turning red, then white from the pressure. Every inch of his body shook, and his bladder released. He felt the slow trickle of warmth down his leg and over his seat. It was over. They were here to take him away, to put him in a small room with no art, no faces or makeup, no vision.

  Then the cruiser flashed by. It didn’t even slow at the hotel, but raced off into the night. A moment later Christian became aware of his heartbeat, thundering with the retreating wail of the sirens, crashing in his head and pounding behind his ears. He heaved a huge, wrenching breath into his lungs and sat back, weak and shaking miserably.

  The stench of his urine finally dragged him back to awareness, invading his nostrils with the acrid aroma of ammonia, and he reached out a shaky hand and turned the key. He moved slowly and cautiously, not wanting to fumble around or waste time. He flipped on his headlights and, without thought or memory of passing time and distance, he pulled into the streets, wove around the few bits and pieces of traffic he passed, and drove home.

  When he had parked the Dart, staggered into his apartment, and locked himself inside, he leaned back against the door and slumped to the floor, still numb and trembling.

  It was a long time before he moved, and the sirens still played tag in his head, ricocheting and caroming from side to side, throbbing in pain.

  He placed the film on the counter in the darkroom, staggered to the bathroom, and cleaned himself. It was a ritual cleansing. The fear had robbed him of his strength, and he did not want to face his creations soiled.

  He returned to the darkroom naked, not even bothering to dress in clean clothes. As the sun rose beyond his walls to claim the new day, Christian worked, cutting, dipping, drying, and waiting.

  He passed out, kneeling on the floor, kneeling before the beauty he had wrought, kneeling but not seeing. Lost in dreams and images as masterpieces formed of his vision hung limp and unnoticed, forgotten in the darkness. Patiently they waited for his return.

  EIGHT

  The girl on the bed had been beautiful, a young model, according to the reports, and Tommy was as close to truly sick as he could physically come without losing perfectly digested food. Such a shame. Such a God damned waste.

  He was a hard man, had been called such on many occasions. It came with the job and the years of experience. He'd seen bodies so mutilated that positive ID had been impossible, teeth pulverized, prints burned, tattoos ripped from once li
ving skin. None of it had prepared him for the simple horror he now faced.

  It was not a mutilation, far from it. The girl, whose name was Cherie, was in as perfect a condition as he'd ever seen a corpse. Eerily perfect. Her face was carefully made up, hair brushed back just so, and her hand had been propped against one knee so that her body leaned slightly forward, face tilted up to stare glassily at nothing in this world. She looked almost ready to stand up and stretch.

  The eyes, in fact, would have been the only give-away from even a short distance away that this was a very, very dead young woman. Tommy could hardly take his eyes from her naked body, even now. Her breasts were full, legs long and tanned; face so damned erotic with that makeup on, that perfectly crafted, otherworldly makeup. Beautiful, but dead.

  The wall behind her had been draped with blue velvet, and it was arranged to hide every inch of the dingy, cracked plaster of the sleazy hotel room that surrounded her. Tommy's stomach gave an all-too familiar lurch, and he turned away, shaking his head. It might be hidden, but the cheapness of the place, the underlying decay, permeated the air and assaulted his senses.

  That girl didn't belong here, didn't belong in California at all. Not for the first time he wondered how someone like her, someone with everything in life to look forward to, would come here to be a part of this.

  The mirror was what drew his eyes, even with the beautiful, naked model lying dead on the bed, the mirror and the sick, grisly message it bore. The girl had been here for the psycho, but the message on the mirror was personal. It was there for him.

  The killer had left them a note. It seemed he was unable to hide his creativity from the world and not quite content with just his photos, none of which had been left behind. He'd written a poem, scrawled in the lipstick shade of a dead, Cocaine-addicted Cocaine-addicted model. He'd even finished it with a God damned flourish. Swell.