“What does it make you think of?” I said. “When you touch me?”
“I don’t know, Ivy. Does it matter?”
“You don’t like the way I look, do you?”
“You look the way you’re supposed to,” he said. “You look the way women look. You have breasts.” He cast his gaze down to them and he furrowed his brow.
“Yes, but do you like it?”
“Does that matter?”
“Of course it matters,” I said. “I can’t enjoy this if you aren’t enjoying it.”
“Why not?”
I stumbled backwards, colliding with the wall of the shower. “Because it’s not…” I shoved aside the shower curtain and threw myself outside. “Because it’s like rape or something. Because it’s… it’s wrong.”
“Ivy, where are you going?”
I pulled my clothes back on. I was wet, and they stuck to my skin, but I didn’t care. “I can’t do it, Miles. I just can’t.”
“Wait,” he said.
I didn’t wait.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I fled from Miles’s house. I got in my car and tore out of there, and I drove back for Keene, feeling shaky and disoriented.
What had I just done? Why had I left him like that? He was trying harder than he’d ever tried before. He was doing what I’d always wanted him to do.
Maybe it was because I knew that if Miles and I had sex, it would be some kind of rote, mechanical act, utterly unsatisfying for either of us.
But I thought it was because I knew the real truth, and that was that there was nothing Miles could do to stop me from being the way I was. Even if Miles suddenly became a sexual dynamo, who was interested in having sex with me whenever I wanted it—three times a day in as many positions—that wouldn’t stop me from needing to hook up with random strangers.
There was something about the anonymity of the act, the purity of it. It was pure because it was only about sex—nothing else. And that was what I craved. Straightforward sex with someone who I never had to face again. I couldn’t completely give that up. Not for Miles. Not for any man, even if I loved him.
Tears started flowing out of my eyes, and I wiped at them with one hand, while the other gripped the steering wheel so tight that my knuckles were turning white.
“I’m a sex addict,” I whispered to the car. “Oh my God, I’m a sex addict.”
I started to sob.
The tears came stronger, blinding me as I tried to drive. I was going to have to pull over.
My phone started ringing.
Grateful for the distraction, I picked it up. Too late, I realized it was probably Miles, and I didn’t think I wanted to talk to him.
But it wasn’t Miles.
“Hi, Ivy.”
“Hi?” I didn’t recognize the voice.
“I was thinking that maybe I was a little rude to you earlier. I should have tried to help you with your serial killer problem.”
“Ralph?” I said.
“I’m stopped for the night,” he said. “You should come see me.”
Ahead of me, I could see a sign for the interstate. “You’re just up the highway, aren’t you?”
“I’d really like to see you.”
This was what I wanted. Straightforward sex. An escape. An encounter with a stranger. Well, a pseudo stranger. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t had sex with Ralph before. And yeah, the sex with Ralph hadn’t been that good, but that was okay. It had been raw and real, and it wasn’t forced the way it would have been with Miles.
And I was turned on.
I was still turned on from seeing Miles’s bare back…
“Where exactly are you?” I asked him.
“You’re coming to see me?”
“Yes.”
* * *
Ralph was in an amorous mood, apparently, because he told me that we’d meet at a motel he knew about. Instead of having to get it on in the sleeping berth of his truck, we’d have a bed. I supposed I should have been impressed, but I was actually a little disappointed, because I felt like the motel room seemed too calculated—not like the raw, immediate encounter I had in mind. I hoped he wasn’t expecting us to get to know each other. To sip wine and watch HBO or something. I wasn’t interested in that kind of thing.
I needed to purge myself, get this animal lust out of my system, and then I’d be able to go back to trying to figure out this case, which was what I should have been focusing on, anyway.
Damn Miles. Why had he started all this? I hadn’t gone to his house to rekindle things between us. I had gone for advice, because I thought I’d solved the case. Of course, he was right, there was no way to find the killer if it was a serial killer..
So, maybe I was wrong. Maybe there was no serial killer of opportunity trolling up and down the interstate, taking girls out of their beds at night.
After all, what would he do with the bodies?
And where did he kill them? If he killed them in their houses, why wasn’t there any evidence of their deaths?
Anyway, it was a ridiculous idea I’d posited. It was a killer without ego.
Because that was the biggest problem with serial killers. They were so clever, and they wanted people to know how clever they were, so they left the patterns and the clues. They taunted newspapers and called police stations. They played dangerous games, and they always got caught. There was no way there was some guy out there just quietly killing people and never once trying to brag about it.
Wouldn’t he feel diminished, knowing that no one knew all that he’d gotten away with?
No, he’d have to brag about it once and a while, wouldn’t he?
I peered outside at the surroundings streaming past me. Man, this motel was really out in the middle of nowhere. I was following my GPS, and I hoped it was right, because I was going way off the interstate. The dinky two-lane road was narrow, flanked by underbrush and trees. The lines on the road looked as if they hadn’t been refreshed in years. The twin yellow lines in the center were faint and cracked in places.
There wasn’t anyone else traveling on this old road either. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen another car.
But then, that was what Ralph had said about this place. He said it was out of the way. He said he liked to come here for privacy. So, I drove on, trusting the GPS would get me there okay.
Finally, I arrived at the motel that Ralph had told me about. I pulled into the parking lot. The sign was dark, and I thought that was strange. Shouldn’t the motel have the sign lit up? At the very least, there should be lights on inside the main lobby, and there weren’t.
I got out of the car and shut the door behind myself. The night was warm, but the air was breezy, and a little tendril of cold wind lifted my hair away from my neck.
My car was the only car in the parking lot.
Wait. This couldn’t be right. I had to be at the wrong motel. This motel was abandoned.
Now that I was out of the car, I could see that the sign was overgrown with ivy and vines. The paint on the motel was peeling, there were plants growing up through the cracks in the asphalt, the front door hung open, hanging off its hinges. It was like an open mouth, a maw of darkness that wanted to swallow me up.
My heartbeat started to pick up speed.
You catch serial killers or something?
Why had Ralph brought up serial killers that night? That wasn’t a logical connection to my being a private detective. Was he….? Was he… bragging?
Ralph’s precise words floated back to me. I could remember what he’d said now—all of it with crystal clarity. You’ve only read about the ones that got caught, though.
Oh, hell.
Oh fuckity fuck fuck, what the hell had I gotten myself into?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I dove for the door to my car, grasping the handle and yanking it open.
And strong arms grabbed me from behind, wrapping around my arms and torso, pinning my hands against my sides.
; I struggled, tightening my grip on my keys. I could use them as a weapon, if I could just twist my hand far enough, get them into his flesh…
A grunt behind me, and then he was prying the keys away from me. “I don’t want you going anywhere, Ivy,” he whispered in my ear. “I’ve got something special planned for you.”
I recognized Ralph’s voice. It really was him. Maybe if I played dumb. “What’s going on? Are we playing some kind of game, because I don’t know if I’m into that.” I sounded terrified, but that worked. I’d be terrified, even if I hadn’t worked out that he was a serial killer.
He chuckled. “Yes, a game. One of my favorites. And it’s actually a little bit better to play if you’re not ‘into it.’”
A shudder went through me.
Oh God, oh God, oh God. What was he going to do to me? Did he rape his victims? I didn’t know, because we didn’t have bodies. We didn’t have any evidence of what he did to his victims, so maybe he did rape them. Geez. I thought about the way we’d had sex that first night, how he hadn’t been able to get an erection until he was pushing my face down into the bed, and then, then, he’d fucked me hard and fast and…
Oh shit.
My breath was coming in gasps. I was going to hyperventilate and pass out. My pulse was racing. My entire body had broken out in a cold sweat. I didn’t want this to happen to me.
Maybe if I begged him—
Fuck that.
Abruptly, I twisted in his arms, bringing my elbow back like a piston.
He oomphed as it collided with his ribcage, and his grip loosened.
I pressed my advantage, turning and digging my fingernails into whatever part of him that I could touch—his belly, his arm. I wished I could reach his face, but my arms were still pinned.
He let out a cry of frustration, and his grip tightened on me again—painfully tight, squeezing my ribs, practically popping them.
I yelled.
“Don’t be difficult, please?” he murmured.
I wanted to keep struggling, but it hurt, and I could hardly move.
His arm settled around my neck, tightening there.
I panicked. He was already strangling me?!
I thrashed in his arms.
The pressure at my neck increased.
And I passed out.
* * *
When I woke up, I was tied to a bed frame in one of the abandoned rooms. I was spread eagle, hands and legs apart. To my relief, I was still wearing my clothes. But my pockets were empty, and I could feel the missing weight. I didn’t have my cell phone, didn’t have my wallet, didn’t have anything. He’d taken my communication and my money.
Ralph was at the front of the room, humming to himself. There was a row of candles on the dresser, and he was lighting one after the other. From the rivets of old dried wax dripping down over the edge, I could see that he had done this many times before.
So, maybe I was wrong. Maybe Ralph did have his rituals. Maybe he was just like the other serial killers.
“You didn’t need to do this,” I said. “I didn’t know it was you.”
He lit another candle. “You knew enough. You were too close to figuring it out. I couldn’t have that.” He turned to me, blowing out the match he’d used to light the candle. Lit from behind by all the flickering lights, he was only a hulking silhouette. “It was thrilling, being with you that night, knowing that the body of the girl was so close, wrapped up in the truck’s cargo container. Knowing you investigated things like that, and that you had absolutely no idea.”
“And I never would have,” I said. “If you’d kept your big mouth shut about serial killers, I never would have figured it out.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter what you figured out now, does it?” He advanced on me, sitting down on the edge of the bed. He touched my face.
I recoiled.
He smiled.
I glared at him. Okay, this was it. This was the part when I kept him talking and appealed to his ego, and I bought myself time to escape. “This is what gets you off? Torturing women?”
“Have I tortured you?”
“But that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? It’s like I said before. Serial killers are always doing it because they’re twisted up about sex. They can’t do it like normal people, so they have try to turn their victims into willing—”
“It’s not about sex.” He glared at me.
Good, tell me what it is about, then. I looked around the room, trying to think about some way to get out of the room.
It didn’t look good. The room was pretty bare besides the old bed and the old dresser. There were a few paintings on the wall, but they—and the wall—had been badly water damaged. The whole place smelled musty and old, like rotting wood.
“I have a completely normal sex life,” he said. “I don’t take the girls to have sex with them.”
“So, you just kill them?”
“Yes.”
“How?” I needed a weapon. Well, no, first, I needed to get untied from the bed. Then I needed a weapon. Surreptitiously as possible, I tested the ropes that held me. This wasn’t going to be easy. They were tied pretty tight.
Ralph got a faraway look in his eyes. “Different ways. I like trying things. I like seeing how long they stay alive.”
Oh. That shook me up. I didn’t want to think about that. He was going to kill me, and he was going to take his time with it.
“See?” He pointed at the bed beneath me. “Sometimes, I bleed them out.”
I could see a dark stain under my body. So, he’d killed another person in this exact same place? I was lying on someone else’s blood?
It was all I could do not to shudder. “But it’s always women,” I said, my voice shaking. I was trying to sound defiant, but I wasn’t sure I was succeeding. “So, you can’t claim it’s not sexually motivated.”
“I pick women because they’re easier to subdue,” he said. “I like to kill them here.” He gestured around at the room. “But sometimes I can’t, because I’m too far away. Sometimes I have to kill them on the road and bring the bodies here. It can still be interesting to cut them up after they’re dead.” He traced a finger over the inside of my forearm. “It’s easier to see where the muscles go together and come apart.”
Okay, that time I did shudder.
Ralph cocked his head at me, sizing me up like a bug.
Keep him talking. You have to keep him talking. Distract him.
I licked my dry lips. “But how do you get the bodies here? I know for a fact you didn’t park your truck outside Madison’s house. You telling me that you carried her through the streets back to the truck stop?”
Of course, I had to admit that I didn’t know what I was really accomplishing with this make-him-talk strategy. I hadn’t come up with any ideas to get out of this, and I hadn’t seen anything I could use as a weapon. Sure, I could maybe use the candles to burn the ropes, but there was no way I could move the entire bed over there.
He smiled. “Sometimes, I have to wrap them up in their bedsheets.” He got up from the bed.
I looked up at the knots that held me to the headboard. I scrabbled, trying to get one hand down to attempt to untie it. But it was useless.
On the other side of the room, Ralph was holding up an enormous laundry bag—the kind with a drawstring at the top. “If anyone looks inside, all they see are the sheets.”
I shook my head. “No, you can’t tell me you carry a body in that?”
“Slung over my shoulder.” He looked incredibly proud of himself.
“There’s no way someone could do that. Too heavy.”
“I’m very strong.”
What the hell was I doing here? I was just freaking myself out worse. All this discussion of bodies in terms of weight—as if they weren’t actual people—was messing with my head. And the atmosphere of the room was awful. The disarray and decay, under lit by the flickering candles… It was all I could do to keep breathing.
But then… t
hen I saw a glint of metal at Ralph’s waist.
I squinted. That was a knife. A little pocket knife that he had in his pocket. If I could get that…
Okay, think of something else to say. Get him back over here.
But what? What to ask? What to say?
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “You’re not that strong. No one is.”
He just laughed. “I can’t even count the number of times I’ve done it. Sometimes all in one night, like with your missing girls. That night was glorious. One stop in Renmawr to pick up the first girl, then a quick jaunt up the interstate for a celebratory drink. Where I met you.” He wandered back over to the bed, but he didn’t sit down again. He just peered down at me. “See, sometimes I pick up women afterward. But that doesn’t mean it’s about sex. I like sex, of course. Who doesn’t?”
I flexed my hand, as if I was just trying to get circulation running through it. In fact, I was stretching out to see if I could reach his pocket knife. No way. My fingers weren’t even close.
I needed to get him closer. “I like sex, Ralph. That’s what I came here for. Sex.”
“Yes, you’re different, aren’t you? You’re not like other women.”
“I’m very different.” Come over here, you fuckhead. I want your stupid pocket knife.
But he turned away from me. “I should have realized how different you were then. But I didn’t. I was only upset that you didn’t spend the night. It gets lonely on the road. Sometimes I want someone close.”
He had to be kidding, right? He went and took girls out of their beds, shoved them in laundry bags and flung them in the back of his truck, and then he wanted to cuddle? Motherfucker. I reached out for the pocket knife again, even though I knew it was hopeless.
But…
Actually, I was at a better angle here. His back was to me, and his hip was angled close, and if I just strained…
“So, I got back on the road, went up another exit. That’s when I found the other girl.”
Almost there. Almost. Just another centimeter. The ropes dug painfully into my hand.
“I had to take her too.”
My fingers brushed the knife. It fell out of his pocket, landing on the bed next to me, soundlessly.
Skin and Blond Page 26
