Twisted Hunger

by Marilyn Campbell

  Luke hadn’t dated anyone on a steady basis for over two years. His opinion that playing the field was more fun than sitting in the dugout hadn’t changed with time. Of all the beautiful, intelligent or talented women he’d become acquainted with, none of them were able to sell him on a long-term commitment. He used Terrell’s track record as the perfect example to support his way of thinking.

  Terrell’s two-bedroom townhouse was in a neat, middle-class neighborhood, but it was still a step down from the kind of house he’d grown up in. As the son of a professional football player, he could have done better financially if he’d followed his father’s footsteps, but he had chosen to funnel his ability to intimidate with his stature along a more useful path.

  As Luke entered the front door, he stopped and looked around with some dismay. The last time he’d been here, the living room was decidedly masculine with dark wood and black leather. That same room now looked like a Caribbean hotel lobby, complete with white wicker furniture and miles of pastel, flowered fabric. “I, uh, see you’ve done some redecorating,” he said, stifling a laugh.

  Terrell grunted. “Nita spent two months of my paychecks making this her home. Wait until you see my bedroom. Pink and lilac from wall to wall. Funny thing is, she didn’t even try to sue me for the house. I guess she thought it was more of a punishment if she made me live in it like this. The guest bedroom isn’t too bad though. By the time she got to that room, she had finished the decorating course she was taking and had moved on to a computer class. You know where it is. Take your bags upstairs and I’ll crack open a couple beers.”

  “I’d rather you crack open that file you mentioned.”

  Terrell made a face. “Believe me, you’ll want a beer to chase down what’s in it.”

  Luke was too anxious to get a look at the file to bother unpacking completely. He was soon seated in one of the more comfortable looking chairs with a beer in his hand and an expectant expression on his face.

  Terrell pointed to a brown expansion file he’d placed on the glass-topped coffee table beside a platter of nacho chips and salsa. “In there is a copy of every report, newspaper clipping and telephone call transcription that may have had anything to do with The Eye Doctor for the past twenty-six years.”

  “Twenty-six?” Luke repeated with some surprise.

  “Yeah. Some of it came through my department, but a big chunk of it came out of FBI files. For a while I had a contact there who was just as interested in finding The Eye Doctor as I was.” He answered Luke’s unspoken question before it was verbalized. “Don’t worry. I never told him a thing about you or why I was so fascinated with these cases, other than from a professional standpoint.”

  “What happened to the FBI contact?”

  Terrell shrugged. “He retired a few years back. I never heard from him after that. I guess he got tired of banging his head against brick walls. Although I’m kind of surprised he didn’t call me after this last one.” He leaned forward and extracted the individual manila folders from the expansion file. “You can read every word on your own, but I can give you an overview if you’d like.”

  Luke fanned out the file folders and glanced over the typed labels on each. Some were subjects, like FBI Profile and Newspaper Clippings, and others had a person’s name on it. “I’d like to hear your overview first.”

  “Okay. Here goes. The first unsolved case of death by throat slashing, with eyeball removal, took place twenty-six years ago on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia. The victim was a popular white male student, twenty years old. He was junior class president and homecoming king. For a while, it was believed that it was some sort of fraternity ritual gone really bad, but years later it was lumped in with the rest of these.

  “From that first one to the two murders that occurred in Atlanta seven years ago, there were a total of eight men and one woman who appear to have all been victims of The Eye Doctor. The FBI profile folder has a summary analysis in it that will give you a quick introduction to all the victims. It will also show you why they made almost no progress toward solving the cases.

  “In traditional serial killer profiles, the analyst is able to determine one or more common elements that tie the victims together. From there, they analyze the sort of person who would perform the atrocity and why.

  “The problem they faced here was that these people were from different age groups, professions, ethnic backgrounds and economic levels. There was only one woman, but that’s enough to keep it inconsistent as far as gender goes. Three, plus this last, were found in California, but the other six were murdered in or near a variety of large cities elsewhere in the United States.”

  Luke held up a finger to insert a question. “Wouldn’t that suggest that the killer’s home base might be in California?”

  Nodding, Terrell replied, “Possibly. And two of those four were in the Los Angeles area, but that’s hardly narrowing down the field of suspects. The one thing that does connect the murders, besides the missing eyeballs, is that all the mutilations seem to have been performed by a similar weapon, a long, thin curved blade, with a concave clipped point, probably a type of Bowie knife—like you remembered seeing.

  “An interesting note about that, by the way—all the killings were done with one clean slash, except the woman. That one had two distinct cuts, almost as though the killer had been interrupted or momentarily changed her mind.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t quite as angry at that one,” Luke offered in a sarcastic tone.

  “That might make some sense, if we could figure out what got her angry enough to kill at all. Anyway, here’s the part that I always found the most curious. Although you saw a whore, there has never been any indication that the murders had a sexual connotation… until this last one. Along that line, there was something missing that is found in most serial killings—there were no teeth marks anywhere on the victims’ bodies.”

  Luke rubbed his jaw. “I remember reading something about that. How they’ve often confirmed the identity of a serial killer by matching his teeth impressions with those found on his victim.”

  “And your use of the male pronoun just now is the other thing that fits a standard profile, but not this one. The average serial killer is a white male, between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. You saw a woman, and although she may have been in her mid to late twenties then, she’d be well past the average age by now.”

  “Her being a woman is one of the things that have always confused me,” Luke added. “My recollection is that she was taller than I was, but so were all my friends. I didn’t reach the six-foot mark until I was a senior. And she had on high heels besides. What I’m getting at is, even though she seemed pretty strongly built, she didn’t look big enough or strong enough to cut a man’s throat without his fighting back.”

  “Most of them had some type of drugs or alcohol in their systems when they were killed, others bore evidence of having been constrained in one way or another. You’ll see the specific notations in their individual files.

  “Another big difference between this perp and the average serial killer is the timing of the murders. Usually some sort of pattern can be established, with the length of time between kills continuously lessening as the killer’s blood lust increases. To make a difficult situation worse, this killer never left any messages or tokens behind, nor did she make any attempt to take credit for the executions. She is clearly intelligent and sane enough to cover all her tracks every single time. Not even a strand of hair or fragment of skin under the victim’s fingernails was ever found that could be used for a DNA comparison, if and when a suspect is ever arrested.”

  Luke held up a hand. “What did you say before about sex being involved in this last one?”

  Terrell nodded. “It could be a variation from the pattern but so far forensics hasn’t come up with any sort of match. As I said, there is evidence suggesting the victim had been performing oral sex on someone but it was a male, not a female. The current theory is
the murderer was watching and waited until the vic was left alone. So far no one has come forward to claim the honor of being the last one to see Stewart Neuman alive and there’s no DNA match in the system.

  “At any rate, there is no subconscious crying out to be caught and stopped. Because of that omission and the other atypical circumstances, the FBI’s deduction is that we are not dealing with a serial killer at all. Instead, she behaves more like an assassin—someone who murders for a logical or impersonal reason, like money, and only takes a victim when that reason requires it or the price is paid.”

  “But why would an assassin take the eyeballs away?”

  “Who knows? Maybe she’s a little medieval and delivers the eyes to whoever hired her to do the hit.”

  Luke made a face. “That would certainly be more effective than sending them a bill.”

  “Just in case I haven’t given you enough to think about, consider this. The FBI also concluded that there really wasn’t enough evidence to tell if one person committed all the murders or if one or more of them were by a copycat.”

  “Shit,” Luke whispered.

  “That’s exactly what we’ve got on this new case too—shit. At least so far. The forensics team is still going through everything recovered from the scene. But, there might be something to the fact that the killer is back in the Los Angeles area.”

  “What do you think that means?”

  Terrell shrugged. “I have no idea. It just seems to be more than a coincidence. Anyway, the only new clue is the possible homosexual angle. We’ve already been making calls to find out if any of the other victims were gay, but so far this one seems to be the first, at least as far as any of the families knew about.”

  “Has the FBI come in on this one too?”

  “They’ve got the information, but they’re leaving it up to us to handle for the moment. I gather there are some politics involved, and I know better than to question that stuff.”

  Terrell finished his bottle of beer, burped softly and stood up. “Look, why don’t you go ahead and get acquainted with some of this material while I make a run to the grocery store. I didn’t have time to pick anything up before you got here and there’s not much in the fridge.”

  “I’d be just as happy to eat out.”

  “You’ll be doing plenty of that, but I thought tonight you’d like some home-cooking.”

  Luke’s eyes lit up. “Fajitas Mamacita?”

  “Of course.” Terrell knew that was Luke’s favorite meal, and cooking was one of his favorite pastimes that he never had time for.

  “Then get your ass moving, boy. You know how mean I get when I’m hungry.”

  Terrell looked down from his greater height and arched an eyebrow at him. “Who’s callin’ who boy?”

  Luke looked from side to side. “It must have been that troublemaker Pete again. If you move fast enough, you might just catch him this time.”

  Grinning broadly, Terrell headed for the front door. Poor Pete had gotten blamed for half the trouble they’d gotten into when they were kids, and it had worked about half the time.

  The overview Terrell had provided didn’t give Luke anything to be hopeful about. If anything, it was depressing to know how many more people had lost their lives at the whore’s hand while he hid his head in the sand. And how many more might there be whose bodies weren’t found and identified over the years? If only he’d had the nerve to speak up…

  You’d have been killed just like Pablo, his voice of reason argued. You were only a fifteen-year-old kid then. There was nothing you could have done.

  He’d recited those sentences to himself thousands of times over the years and never once had they taken hold. He had to find a way to make a difference now, before the killer struck again. He picked up the profile folder and found the victim summary sheet Terrell had referred to.

  Two years after the University of Pennsylvania’s homecoming king was killed, the second victim was found in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a forty-four-year-old political science professor at Harvard. Both men had Anglo-Saxon names and were affiliated with a large university in the northeastern United States, but the professor was married with two children, while the student had been single and childless.

  Victims three, four and five all took place in California within a few months of each other. Approximately three years had passed between murders and none of the newly deceased had attended the University of Pennsylvania or Harvard, nor did they have an academic career of any kind.

  The third murder victim was a thirty-one-year-old marketing analyst for a public relations firm in Oakland. He was divorced, Jewish and had one child.

  Number four was the one Luke had witnessed in the barrio alley—a twenty-six-year-old, unemployed construction worker. No wife, no kids, no college education.

  The fifth was a seventy-year-old retired police officer in San Diego. He was a Catholic widower of Irish descent with four children and three grandchildren. He and his wife lived in moderation on his pension and social security.

  The next murder also happened after a three-year hiatus, in New Orleans. It was also the only woman and the first black on the list. She was a forty-eight-year-old physical therapist who worked in a nursing home, was married, and had seven children and two grandchildren.

  One year later, another victim was claimed from the medical field. He was a fifty-two-year-old psychiatrist in Seattle. His family was of protestant German descent, he had never been married and there were no known children, but he had plenty of money in the bank.

  Then, for some reason, there was a ten-year break. Luke immediately thought that this could have been a period of time during which none of the killer’s victims had been found. But this killer never seemed to make any attempt to hide the bodies. Then, seven years ago, the treasurer of a large manufacturing firm in Atlanta was added to the file. He had a sizable income, but his debts were very high and his bank accounts very lean. This thirty-nine-year-old Jewish man had a wife, an ex-wife and two children with each.

  The very next day, victim number nine was murdered in Atlanta. He was a twenty-five-year-old computer programmer who was attending a convention in that city with his bride of two months.

  That was the last entry in the FBI file, but Luke mentally added the most recent mutilation of Stewart Neuman—the homosexual, late-middle-aged owner of the men’s clothing shop in Beverly Hills.

  Attached to the summary was a checklist of other possible tie-ins, such as birthplace and circumstances, schools attended, babysitters, housekeepers or other household service employees, parents’ employment histories, where they took their annual vacations if any and so on. Luke couldn’t think of any aspect of a person’s life that the FBI hadn’t checked in an attempt to find a common link between all the victims.

  The theory of the killer being a hired assassin was also unsupported since, in several cases, no one seemed to have benefited from the deaths.

  Terrell’s conclusions had been completely accurate. There was simply no pattern from which to formulate any theories. So why did Luke think he could help?

  Because I saw her face… and survived.

  He looked over the names of the other file folders on the table and pulled out the one titled Witnesses’ Statements. It included a variety of things, from transcriptions of phone tips to interviews with people who had last spoken with the victims or recalled seeing the deceased talking to a stranger prior to the murder.

  Based on the interviews, in five of the cases it was deduced that the victims may have willingly gone somewhere with their murderer. In two of those cases, an unknown woman was mentioned but the descriptions were very different and neither sounded like the woman Luke had seen.

  The only statement from someone who claimed to be an eye witness to one of the murders was the one made by Pablo. Even though the cops had dismissed his story, the report had been kept on file.

  Luke read over the statement Pablo had given and could understand why it had been
dismissed. He had made the psycho prostitute sound like a cross between Wonder Woman and Tammy Faye Baker, and he had made up an elaborate, hand-to-hand combat scene from which he had barely escaped with his life. Jesus, Pablo. She probably killed you because of your insulting description of her.

  The truth was, she had seemed somewhat attractive and not all that sleazy. Even to a scared teen, her clothes had looked classier than what one would expect to see on a back-alley whore.

  For the first time in twenty-one years, probably because he had worked so hard to block it out, it occurred to him that the woman may not have been a real whore, but a woman from a higher station pretending to be a hooker to lure one particular man who might be attracted by that disguise.

  Could the whore he’d seen and the two female strangers mentioned in the other statements be the same woman? What if she simply used a different disguise for each of her victims? What if she really was a professional assassin?

  He slumped back in the chair. He had arrived here thinking he could do something to help because he had seen the whore’s face, but if she were a pro, or even just a master of disguises, the odds against his being able to identify her had now multiplied by a few million.

  Chapter 4

  Terrell guided Luke into an interrogation room down the hall from his office and set several thick mug shot books down on the table. “Like I told you last night, there are some politics involved in a case like this. And a lot of media. You may be feeling all gung ho, but I don’t want to see you being interviewed on the six o’clock news and ending up dead by eleven.

  “For the time being, the best thing is not to admit you’re here about any murders. To explain why you’re looking at mug shots, I said you’re a friend of a friend who came to L.A. as a tourist and got robbed by a prostitute.” As Luke sat down and opened the first book, Terrell shook his head. “You know this is probably a waste of time.”

  Luke shrugged. “Yeah, but it’s my time to waste until one of us thinks of something more worthwhile.”