by Lisa Regan
“Yeah, well I’ll fuck you tonight before I gut you, bitch.”
“You’ve never killed anyone before, Nico,” I pointed out.
“You don’t know I never killed anyone before,” Nico challenged.
With the patience a mother shows her child I said, “Yes, Nico, I do know.”
He was already on his feet again.
“I profiled you, jerk-off. You’re just an angry little boy whose mother was too overbearing”—he drew closer—“you just want to be in control. You get off on making women feel afraid, on overpowering them, humiliating them.”
My jaw broke with a loud crack. Another fist followed. “Shut the fuck up,” he screamed.
Another punch. Skin cracking skin. Lips splitting against teeth. Eyes watering, nose crumpling. His voice was unnaturally high. “You thought you were so clever, you worthless whore. Moving into my territory, leaving your window open. Waiting for me. Yeah, well I got off.”
The room tipped, descending out of sight like two halves of a broken ship sliding into the ocean.
“You fucked me,” he said. “Now I’m gonna fuck you.”
I tried to speak, but my jaw didn’t work. I couldn’t see him anymore. I felt his hands close around my throat. I tried to tuck my chin, but I was too late. The darkness came from the inside out.
I don’t know how long it was. Each time I went out, I thought it was the last time. But I kept floating back up to consciousness. It was always dark. Both my eyes swelled shut. I don’t remember much of it. He tore at my hair, stabbed me in the thighs, struck me again and again. Then he groped me, licked me, tried to kiss my broken mouth.
The pain was a dull undercurrent. I had gone to another place. A stone fortress in my head. My twin sister, Lexie, was there, hand outstretched, ten years younger as she had been at the time of her death. She smiled at me. A mirror image.
I reached out to take her hand, but I never made it. There was a chime, a familiar ding-dong that brought me back. My doorbell. Silence. I must have been alone then. I felt my hands come loose. They were heavy and weakened by hours of restraint.
I thought I was hallucinating. Maybe this was it. Death. Precious death. I wanted to go to it, rise up to it, and I did, legs suddenly free. I staggered, sinking back onto the chair. Death had a male voice. “You have to stand,” it said. I could feel death’s hushed breath on my ear as it pulled me up.
My gun was in my hands then, as familiar as a hot bath. Death lifted my arms. They trembled with the weight of the firearm. “There’s a round in the chamber,” death whispered. I stumbled backward until my skin touched the chair for feeble support.
“He’s coming,” death said. “You have to do this. Listen for him.”
And I did.
Death was gone. When Nico Sala came back for me, I brought the gun up level with my shoulders and aimed straight in front of me. I fired. I heard three footfalls, the crash of wood against wood. I squeezed off two more shots before I heard the thud of his body on the floor.
I sank with him, until the back of my head rested against the chair. I breathed.
In the movies, after the villain is destroyed and the heroine lies battered and spent, the sirens are already sounding in the distance. It doesn’t work that way in real life. The sirens come later, much later.
They told me that a pizza boy called the police. He’d been sent to the wrong address. He rang my doorbell and Nico Sala answered, wild-eyed, looking pretty frightening covered in my blood. Nico told the kid in no uncertain terms to get lost.
My face, before it underwent reconstructive surgery to repair the damage Nico Sala had done, was splashed all over the media. I was interviewed and interrogated. I met the President. I received a special commendation from the Bureau. After my recovery, I was offered a position as a Criminal Investigative Analyst in the Behavior Analysis Unit at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, which I accepted.
I know what they told me. I know what I remember from that night. I know that someone saved my life that night.
But it wasn’t me.
CHAPTER TWO
Wyatt, Five Years Later
July 4th-5th
Wyatt Anderton held his Smith & Wesson 22A in his right hand, tucked close to his body and waited for Martin Sorenson to answer his door bell. The morning sun beat down on the back of his neck. Sweat pooled inside the collar of his oxford shirt. He glanced over his shoulder, down the long driveway to Sorenson’s palatial Tudor-style house. He had parked his rental van close to the house. It was well hidden by a hedgerow that looked as though it hadn’t been trimmed in weeks. The nearest neighbors were far enough away that even if they saw him on the step, they wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup.
He rang the bell three more times before Sorenson finally answered. The door swung open slowly, a stale smell wafting out. Sorenson stood before him in a white cotton tee shirt that had seen better days. Yellow stains peeked from beneath the large man’s armpits. His stomach hung below the shirt’s hem, over the top of his gray sweatpants. Food stains dotted his wrinkled clothes and crumbs littered his beard. He was chewing something. Atop hooded eyes, lines of annoyance creased his forehead.
“What do you want?” he asked. Then he saw the gun.
His eyes widened. His whole face went slack, his jaw hanging open. Before he could react, Wyatt thrust the gun into Sorenson’s face and used his free hand to push the man inside the door. Sorenson didn’t put up a fight. He backed away from Wyatt, stumbling, hands thrown up. His mouth worked, partially chewed food flying from it as he spoke, “Who are you? What are you doing? Stop, stop, stop.”
Wyatt tripped over a pair of loafers laying in the foyer but managed to keep his balance. He pressed the barrel of the gun into Sorenson’s considerable girth. “Shut up,” he barked.
He looked to the left and saw a parlor with a sofa and recliner. Books, newspapers and unopened mail littered the coffee table. He motioned to the room, and Sorenson went into it.
“Sit,” Wyatt commanded.
Sorenson moved slowly, as if the parlor floor was made of ice and he might slip on it and fall. His knees cracked loudly when he sat on the couch. He kept his eyes on Wyatt, both eyebrows arched as if in perpetual surprise. He raised his hands again, but this time he motioned toward the foyer.
“I don’t know who you are,” Sorenson said, his tone more angry than afraid. “But take whatever you want and go. Go, get out of my house.”
Wyatt stood over him. He glanced again at the coffee table and noticed a half-eaten piece of pie atop the mess of papers. “Were you eating?” he said.
Sorenson’s bushy brows drew together. “What?”
Wyatt had an unwanted flash. His grandfather’s beer breath. Were you eating my food, boy? Wyatt was three when he found out what it felt like to have his hand slammed in the refrigerator door. Somehow, his parents never noticed the bruising or how hungry he was when they picked him up. He blinked rapidly and took a deep breath. He had to focus.
“What do you want?” Sorenson asked.
Wyatt smiled, baring his teeth, and Sorenson’s upper body drew back, as if trying to put more distance between them. “I want you to finish your pie,” Wyatt said.
“I don’t—I don’t—”
“Shut up.”
Wyatt kept the gun pointed at Sorenson. He pulled a baggie filled with a powdery substance out of his pants pocket and tossed it into Sorenson’s lap. The man held it up. “What’s this?”
“Put it on your pie.”
“I’m not putting this on my food,” Sorenson said, petulance adding an edge to his tone.
Wyatt leaned over and pressed the barrel of the gun into Sorenson’s forehead. “Put that on your pie and eat it,” he snapped.
Again the flash came, weakening W
yatt’s knees. He tried to push it away, but it came anyway. Eat it, boy. Eat it or I’ll kill you. His grandfather’s thick fingers dug into Wyatt’s throat until his vision began to fade. Wyatt thought of the stray cat his grandfather had squeezed the week before. Squeezed the air out of it until the cat’s eyes went all funny and it stopped moving. It never moved again. His grandfather burned it in a rusted tire ring in his yard.
Panic had made Wyatt’s stomach flutter—like a hundred butterflies inside him. Quickly, he licked the tile floor, trying to capture the smushed glob of apple pie with his tongue. It stuck to the floor. His grandfather chuckled. For a split second, Wyatt felt relief. Maybe it was funny. Maybe he would let Wyatt go. But he didn’t. You wanna eat my food, boy. Eat it, then!
Wyatt pulled himself back from the brink, blinking rapidly. The baggie fluttered in Sorenson’s hands. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, and inched his forehead back from the gun. “I’m not putting this on my food,” he protested again.
Wyatt snatched the baggie from Sorenson’s hands and used his teeth to unseal it. He dumped the contents onto the pie and thrust the plate into Sorenson’s lap. “Eat it,” Wyatt said, lowering his voice. “It won’t kill you.”
Sorenson picked up the fork. He stared at the pie as though Wyatt had just served him in a restaurant. As if he had just found a hair in his food and was about to send it back. “What is it?” he asked, wrinkling his nose.
“Something to make you more…pliable,” Wyatt said.
In a few hours, the drug would wear off, and even a medical examiner would not be able to find evidence of it in Sorenson’s system.
Sorenson made one last effort. “Pliable for what? This is silly. Let’s dispense with this nonsense. I don’t have to eat this. You don’t have to threaten me with that gun. I have money,” he said. “I have a safe upstairs.”
“I’m not interested in your safe,” Wyatt said. He sat down beside Sorenson, moving the gun barrel, digging it into the soft hollow behind the man’s ear. “Eat. Or I will kill you.”
With a sigh that made Wyatt want to pistol whip the man, Sorenson ate slowly. Wyatt was certain the man was trying to figure a way out of the situation. He doubted Sorenson would try to use physical force. He was a college professor, an academic, and by the look of him, he was wildly out of shape.
“Can I have some water?” Sorenson asked.
“No.”
Wyatt looked around the room. It was far too big for what he had planned. Messy too, although the mess would actually work in his favor. Discarded clothes lay draped over the furniture. Stacks of books and what looked like student papers spilled from the end tables onto the floor. Several empty takeout containers—pizza and Chinese—had been pushed to the far end of the coffee table. Another pizza box lay on the seat of the recliner.
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” Wyatt snickered. “Your wife left you what—six weeks ago? Took your kid with her. Didn’t take you long to shit this place up.”
Sorenson’s jowly, pock-marked face, although well hidden beneath an unruly mass of facial hair, paled considerably. “How do you know about my family?” he croaked.
Wyatt waved his hand in the air. “Research. Due diligence. It’s all about the planning, Martin.”
“Planning of what?” Sorenson asked. His voice was getting raspy. It wouldn’t be long.
Wyatt ignored him. “Eat.”
The last bite of pie went down with some difficulty. The drug worked quickly. A moment later, Sorenson slid onto the parlor floor, incapacitated and twitching. Wyatt pushed the coffee table back with his foot to give Sorenson room. The man’s mouth formed a puckered O as he labored to make a “Wha” sound. Wyatt crouched down beside him.
“I won’t tell you why if that is what you want to know.
“Wha…wha…” Sorenson kept trying to form the word. His eyes stayed on Wyatt, wide and dark with panic. He blinked slowly several times, as if testing to ensure that he still could.
“You pride yourself on being ‘superbly intelligent.’ Isn’t that how you described yourself once in some archaic academic journal?” Sorenson stopped blinking. His eyes bugged out ever so slightly, and Wyatt smiled. “Well then, you should not have any difficulty figuring out why I am doing this. Not to worry. You’ll have adequate time to ponder, though the answer to the question why is not the one that will save your life.”
Sorenson’s mouth went still and Wyatt saw a flicker of fear in the fat man’s eyes.
Laughing softly, Wyatt stood up. He left Sorenson on the floor and quickly searched the house. There was a small laundry room off the kitchen that was perfect for Wyatt’s purposes. As he had alluded to with Sorenson, his work was never about the killing, which when not in the grip of the monster, he detested. It was all about what came before the kill, and that required planning. In Sorenson’s case, it had required weeks of secretly absconding with the man’s trash, which Wyatt now used to quickly transform the laundry room into a dumpster after backing the van up to Sorenson’s back door.
It was dirty work to be sure, and at times, had hardly seemed worth it, but then Wyatt remembered the face of the woman he loved all those years ago. She’d passed him in the hallway after meeting with the philosophy professor privately, her face red with fury and frustration. Back then, he’d taken pains to find out as much about Martin Sorenson as he could. Then, as now, Wyatt could not find a single redeeming quality about the man.
The most arduous task on this particular leg of Wyatt’s mission was dragging Sorenson from the parlor to the laundry room.
First Wyatt tried pulling Sorenson by his arms, stretching them over the man’s head. Sorenson easily weighed 300 pounds, and that weight seemed doubled since Wyatt had rendered the man paralyzed. Once the drug wore off, Sorenson would regain full use of his limbs, but it was imperative that he be firmly ensconced in his death bed of garbage when that occurred.
Pulling Sorenson by the legs proved no easier. In fact, it was more exhausting. The man’s legs were thick, round posts, their weight unwieldy. At last, Wyatt devised a crude method of transfer wherein he curled Sorenson’s floppy limbs around his body and logrolled the man from one room to the next. Wyatt closed and locked the door to the laundry room and took up position on the floor just outside.
Then he waited.
Wyatt waited until he was certain that Sorenson was good and hungry. Until the man was fatigued from trying unsuccessfully to break down the laundry room door and escape. Until the stink of his fear and sweat commingled with the pungent smell of the garbage that filled the tiny room.
When the man’s cries and pleas for help died off, Wyatt opened the door. He pulled a chair to the doorway and pointed the gun at Sorenson, flattening his affect against the stench. Sorenson was perched atop the dryer like a slovenly Buddha. His eyes were wild, and the hairs which had escaped his combover floated around his head, giving him a demented appearance.
Wyatt smiled.
“What do you want?” Sorenson asked. The man’s voice was hoarse from having cried out continuously for almost thirty hours.
“You don’t get to ask questions,” Wyatt said.
“You can’t do this. I—”
“I can do anything I please,” Wyatt interrupted.
Sorenson puffed up like a fat bird readying itself for an intense preening session. He opened his trap to speak, but Wyatt stopped him with a shake of his head. Wyatt smiled inside, realizing the power he wielded with a look or a small gesture.
“Not that you particularly deserve it,” Wyatt said. “But I’m going to give you a chance to save your life.”
Wyatt pulled a photo from the inside pocket of his jacket and tossed it to Sorenson. It landed in the trash on the floor, and Sorenson heaved his bulk off the dryer to retrieve it. The machine made a loud dwuong sound, i
ts surface relieved of Sorenson’s weight. The man must have been sitting atop the dryer for several hours because when his feet found the floor, his flabby knees buckled. Sorenson did not bother appearing victimized. Instead he reached for the photo. Holding it in both hands, he studied the woman’s image.
“Do you remember her?” Wyatt asked.
Without looking up, Sorenson shook his head. “No. No. I don’t know her.”
“Yes. You do.”
Sorenson looked at Wyatt. Fear gave him an unnatural pallor. Blue veins in his face and neck stood out in stark relief. He shook the photo in Wyatt’s direction. “I don’t know this woman. You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
Wyatt motioned for Sorenson to return the photo, and the man tossed it at his feet. Carefully, he picked it up and wiped its surface against his pant leg. “I’m disappointed in you Martin but not surprised. You don’t see anyone. You go around maiming people and you forget them the instant they are out of your sight. You don’t care who you hurt. So,” he said, then paused to hold up the photo, “I’ll ask you a final time. Do you remember her?”
Sorenson stared at Wyatt, his pomposity returning—as if at any moment Wyatt would come to his senses, realize the absurdity of the situation and release him. Silently, Wyatt counted to twenty. When Sorenson did not answer, Wyatt backed his chair away and shut the door.
As he pulled Sorenson’s front door closed behind him, Wyatt thought he heard the man cry out again.
CHAPTER THREE
KASSIDY
July 6th
I stood at the head of the conference room table, a photo of a dead woman in my hand. I held it up for my BAU colleagues to see. In the photo, her body was carefully laid out on her living room floor, her head turned to her right side. There was no hint of the woman she might have been. All that was left was a bloated, black and purple carcass. The back of her skull was caved in. Her right eyeball hung from a broken socket, lolling in macabre fashion. Her nose lay flattened in a pulpy mess. I’d looked at the photo a dozen times since receiving the file, but it still made my stomach acids roil.
