“But—”
“Stay put, Kendra. There may be more to this than first glance. Get the local PD to search the trash for the milk container, and get them to look into the family’s past. Agent Cherry will bring more information and further instructions. Until then, find out what you can from the ME and coroner. And Kendra?”
“Yeah?”
“I need you on this one—need you to take the lead.”
And to keep it together, Kendra finished for him in her mind.
The line went dead. Like Kendra, Director Ames was curt and to the point, having more important things to do than waste words.
Fuck.
She turned to the officer who had initially ignored her request to search the garbage.
“You,” she spat, “go outside and look for milk containers.”
The man looked at her as if she had three heads.
“Get the fuck outside and start looking!”
Chapter 4
The shitty motel room that Kendra was staying at only had two redeeming factors: one, it had a minibar; two, the minibar was full.
Flipping off her flats and abandoning them at the foot of the bed, she went straight to the small black fridge tucked beside a worn wooden desk. Her slender hand closed on the handle and she pulled it open. For a moment, Kendra was content in simply basking in the cool air that wafted out at her, and she closed her eyes, imagining that she wasn’t in Butt-fuck-nowhere, USA. Butt-fuck-nowhere that was as hot as Satan’s armpit.
Milk… where did the milk come from?
Kendra’s eyes snapped open and immediately focused on the mini bottle of Jim Beam. She grabbed it, hesitated, then reached back in for the mini of Crown and the mini of Jack. Pulling all three out, she slammed the fridge door closed and collapsed onto the rust-colored duvet adorned with some tacky Navajo design on it.
With one twist, the cap to one of the bottles—she didn’t even take note of which one—came off, accompanied by the all-too-comforting sound of the small metal tabs breaking. She brought it to her lips, taking a healthy swig.
It was Jack, she realized, recognizing the slight banana flavor to it. As she reached for the TV remote on the bedside table, she tilted the bottle and finished it in three swallows.
It burned, but only a little.
Kendra pressed the red button on the upper right hand corner and the TV immediately roared to life, the sound turned up so loud that it was nearly deafening. Kendra swore, and then scrambled to find the volume button in the dim lighting. As she searched, the TV audio continued to blast, the speakers crackling with a mixture of moaning and wet slapping sounds.
Her eyes flicked to the screen, and she saw three nude, writhing bodies followed by close-ups of tongues licking, lips kissing.
Someone’s idea of a fucking joke—leave the TV on a porn channel, the volume maxed out.
Kendra finally found the volume button and immediately lowered it.
The static-filled moans hushed, but Kendra was too tired and too lazy to search for the channel button. Besides, she had found out long ago that porn wasn’t the worst distraction during times like these.
Turns out this time was no exception; allowing her mind to drift, her thoughts quickly turned to Brett, and she began to wonder what he would be doing with his tongue and his lips at this moment. What he would do if she allowed him to take her again.
Kendra cracked open the Crown next, but this time she swallowed in one go, as if thinking of the way Brett had fucked her—rough and hard, squeezing and pinching—had manifested itself in the way she drank.
A tingling sensation began in her inner thighs and quickly spread outward, until her entire core had become tense. Closing her eyes, she sighed, her breathing quickening with the realization that her panties had started to moisten.
Her cell phone buzzed, drawing Kendra out of the fantasy. Her eyes snapped open, and she quickly found the remote and flicked off the TV. Clearing her throat, she grabbed her phone and answered it.
“Hello?”
“Kendra? It’s me, Brett. Just wanted to let you know that I’ll be arriving tonight. Coming in late, gonna get a hotel room. You good for breakfast at eight?”
For the briefest moment, Kendra considered telling him to forget getting his own room and instead to come to her room and stay the night. And part of her wanted that—the part that tingled between her legs and made her nipples hard beneath her white blouse.
But that wasn’t the way it worked between them—that wasn’t the way she worked.
“Sounds fine,” she answered.
There was a pause, an expectant pause, and for a moment, Kendra thought that maybe Brett had picked up on something in her voice. But that was impossible, even for someone as observant and astute as Agent Brett Cherry. If nothing else, Kendra was an expert at keeping her emotions wrapped up tight.
“Anything else?” she asked, suddenly anxious to hang up.
“Yeah… just a question: was it really the little girl’s birthday? Four years old?”
Kendra’s mind flicked to the girl’s pale hand, the fingers stretched out, spotted with blood, reaching out from beneath the two bodies that were crushing her.
Four years old. When I was four, my father abandoned me at the church.
But at least he didn’t murder me.
“Yeah.”
“Fuck.”
There was another pause.
“I’ll see you in the morning, Brett,” Kendra said, then hung up.
For a moment, she just sat there in silence with the TV off, the only sound the phantom noise of children laughing; party sounds. But before these could coalesce into a solid daydream, Kendra forced them away and chugged the bottle of Jack.
Then she got up and headed for the shower.
She felt dirty.
* * *
The cold water felt good on Kendra’s skin, like tiny ice pellets bouncing off her body.
That was okay; her chest and stomach were nearly numb from the scars.
After washing with the horribly fragrant bar of soap that the motel provided, she washed her long, straight black hair with motel shampoo. She had her own stuff in her bag, but she had forgotten to get it and the water just felt too good to get out. She would regret this, she knew, as her hair would dry into a completely unwieldy mess, but at the moment this was one of the furthest things from her mind.
The day had been hot enough to tickle triple digits, and it felt damn good to have an ice-cold shower, even if this was her norm regardless of the weather.
Kendra waited a few more minutes, allowing the water to cascade over the top of her head, collecting her hair into a long, dark, and sudsy point that nearly reached the center of her chest, bent over the way she was.
Eventually, long after the water had run clear, she turned off the tap and stepped onto the grungy bathmat, not bothering to wrap a towel around herself.
The other advantage to a cold shower was that she didn’t have to wait for the fog to clear from the mirror before getting a good look at herself.
As always, her eyes were drawn to the thick pink scars that wrapped their away around her torso, crisscrossing in places, and then to the other scars, the shorter ones that resembled tiny pink maggots.
All told, she counted fifty-four scars on her body, all of them on her torso, filling the space between the tight ‘v’ of her stomach muscles right above her mound, to just beneath the undersides of her breasts.
The cold water had turned Kendra’s pale skin white, as her blood had drawn inward to protect and feed her vital organs.
It also made her scars stand out more.
One in particular, a nearly complete circle above her right hip, looked almost like a balloon.
A balloon…
With one of her nails, she drew a four in the center, the red mark staying for a second before fading to white.
She wondered what was worse, being murdered by your father or not knowing who your father really was.
Or your mother.
Or where you came from.
Her red fingernail traced the outline of the scar, digging deeper with each pass. The thought was childish and downright insulting.
Still, not knowing who she was or where she came from often left her feeling less than alive inside.
And the horrors that she experienced on the job didn’t help, either.
She pressed her finger into the scar and scratched upward. Her finger slipped off the raised flesh and dug into a small area of pristine white skin.
A dot of blood, the color of which was nearly a perfect match for her nail polish, leaked onto her finger.
Kendra didn’t flinch; instead, she just stared, images of Roger Black’s throat, blood gushing out, hot and sticky, coating the bodies of his dying and dead family beneath him, flooding her mind.
Pulsating, his life eking out of him one heartbeat at a time.
She brought her finger to her lips and sucked the blood away. Almost fully dry now save her wet hair, Kendra left the bathroom and collapsed on the bed, not bothering to put on a nightie or even pull back the covers.
The latter was probably for the best, she decided; if the bathmat was any indication, she was better off on top of the sheets than within them.
Kendra fell asleep in less than five minutes, another tiny bottle of cheap whiskey clutched in her hand.
Want to keep reading? Just click HERE to get your copy of Father right now!
Other Books by Patrick Logan
Insatiable Series
Book 1: Skin
Book 2: Crackers
Book 3: Flesh
Book 4: Parasite
Book 5: Stitches (Summer/Fall 2016)
Family Values Trilogy
Witch (Prequel)
Mother
Father
Daughter (Fall 2016)
Short Stories
System Update
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents in this book are either entirely imaginary or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or of places, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Patrick Logan 2016
Cover design: Ebook Launch (www.ebooklaunch.com)
Interior design: © Patrick Logan 2016
Editing: Main Line Editing (www.mainlineediting.com)
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, cannot be reproduced, scanned, or disseminated in any print or electronic form.
Sixth Edition: September 2016
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