"Please. What is it you want?" she begged, tears running down her face, leaving ugly blue and black streaks of mascara and eye shadow. "Money? Sex? I'll give you whatever you want. If it's a blow—" He reached out and slapped her hard across the face. It startled her. It startled him. It also shut her up.
"That will be enough of that talk," he said sternly, looking down at his hand now spotted with blood. He stared at it for a moment in fascination. He hadn't expected blood yet.
A little added bonus.
He glanced up and saw that it came from her lip. Fortunately, he had already donned the surgical gloves. There would be no trace of her DNA left on his skin. Not that this little old Podunk town of Albany Beach had easy access to DNA testing, but he liked to be careful just the same.
The Bloodsucker returned to the task of snapping up the jumpsuit. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a pretty young woman talking like that."
"I'm sorry," she sobbed. "I'm sorry. Please. I feel sick." She let her head fall forward for a moment and she slumped in the chair he had tied her to.
"It's the chloroform. Don't worry, the feeling will wear off," he told her. "Just give it a little time."
He ran his hand over his chest, and satisfied that he was properly covered, he turned to retrieve the tray of supplies he'd prepackaged at the house. He'd gotten fresh gauze and sterile water, and he'd boiled the scalpel in a pot to rid it of any of Kristen's blood cells. On impulse, he'd also picked up another tool in the kitchen that might be handy. Intriguing. Something he had watched late on TV the other night had given him the idea.
Hearing him start toward her, Brandy lifted her head. She struggled against the ropes that bound her in the plastic deck chair. This was a change; he had used a wooden one before but wood was porous and more likely to hold trace evidence. Even with all the plastic sheeting, it didn't hurt to be extra careful.
"Please don't hurt me," she begged, turning her face away as if there were any way she could avoid him.
Her words made him feel bad. Ashamed. His gaze fell to the freshly spread sawdust at his feet. He had hurt her. He'd punched her back in the parking lot. Hit her and given her a bloody lip.
But she'd made him do it, hadn't she? Women were like that. They made you do things you didn't want to do.
The Bloodsucker lifted his head in determination. "Hold still and be quiet," he ordered, setting the tray aside on a small table. He didn't have a lot of time tonight. He needed to get a good night's sleep, go to work fresh and ready to do his job. He wouldn't do much tonight, just have a little fun. He reached for the scalpel.
Brandy screamed and, without thinking, he belted her so hard that her head flew back and her neck snapped with a satisfying crack. "I told you before that you had to be quiet," he barked, reaching impatiently for the tape to gag her again. "You're ruining everything." He was barely able to contain his rage. "Now, just shut up."
It's what Granny had always said. You're ruining everything.
Chapter 2
"Five dead women! Five," Dorothy Truder shouted into the crackly microphone. "A madman is walking our streets, Chief Drummond." The sixty-something woman with blue-rinsed helmet hair pointed an accusing finger at Claire. "And what have you got to show for your ongoing investigation? Hmmm? Tell me that."
Men and women Claire called her friends rose out of their folding metal chairs in the elementary school gym and clapped their hands.
Claire, seated behind the makeshift dais comprised of a cafeteria table and miniature green plastic chairs, wished she could slide to the floor and crawl out on her hands and knees. That, or maybe pop Dorothy Truder in the snout.
"Now, Dottie," Mayor Tugman soothed from the principal's podium usually reserved for graduation day and Fire Prevention Essay Award Night. "The purpose of this meeting is not to make accusations. It is to update you on the murder investigation, and to address any concerns the fine folk of this town might have."
"Address our concerns," Dorothy bellowed.
The microphone screeched and the crowd of more than two hundred cringed in unison. Some covered their ears. A baby began to cry. Claire didn't flinch as she gazed out over the crowd. Most of the locals in Albany Beach had turned out for the town meeting.
Three of her off-duty officers, Sergeant Marsh, Patrolman First Class McCormick and Patrolman Savage sat in folding chairs in the front row, stoic. Though she was taking the brunt of this assault, she could tell they were feeling the heat, too. She spotted the elderly gossip twins, Mary Lou Joseph and Betty Friegal, toward the front, their heads bowed as they both talked at the same time, mouths going a mile a minute. Then there was Mr. and Mrs. Atkins. Their faces were impassive, but Claire could feel their pain, their resentment. They had buried their niece Kristen the previous week, the latest victim of Albany Beach's serial killer. Like the others before her, the monster had purposefully bled her to death and then left her body beside a dumpster like a bag of garbage.
Seth Watkins, a local realtor, talking with Billy Trotter, the first victim's ex-boyfriend, caught her eye. Or at least his lime green sports jacket did. Past criminal records had turned up during her investigation of both men. But she didn't know yet how heavily she should weigh that information in her investigation. Mayor Tugman had a conviction on his record as well. And a kinky one, at that. But that didn't make him a serial killer.
"We are not here, Dottie," the mayor said into the microphone when the feedback faded, "to make accusations or to criticize our fine police force." He had dressed in his best Hawaiian shirt and flex-band polyester pants; huge green and orange parrots danced across his rotund middle as he spoke. He paused to mop his wide brow with a handkerchief and Claire's gaze shifted to the crowd again.
Or could it now be defined as a mob? The voices were getting louder. Angrier. Any minute, she expected someone to hurl a rotten tomato at her.
A group of doctors, nurses and assorted technicians from the hospital congregated behind the rows of folding chairs, beneath the basketball hoop, their stark white uniforms a beacon in the brightly colored sea of pastel polos and bold T-shirts. A handful of postal workers sat in chairs on the aisle, most of them still wearing their light blue uniform shirts.
Claire could hear people whispering her name. The really rude ones spoke right out loud, their voices echoing off the scuff-marked gym floor.
"...Should never have hired her, even if her father was our chief for forty years..."
"...Should have called the state police in immediately..."
"I knew from day one this was too big for her to handle..."
"That nice boy, you know, the detective who used to be her boyfriend. See his name in the paper all the time. He—"
Claire shifted her gaze back to Morris Tugman. The crowd of concerned citizens was getting unruly. People were standing up, shaking fists. One man, a redneck from the trailer park on the edge of town, shouted at another, a neighbor she knew for a fact he'd been arguing with over a loose dog for three months. For a moment Claire feared she was going to have to climb over the table to break up a fistfight.
All she could think of, as the chaos unfolded around her, was thank God her parents had agreed to stay home. They had wanted to come to "support" her, but her father, now on oxygen for his emphysema, would likely have been one of the first good old boys throwing a fist. He'd always been a volatile man, but as he aged, he seemed less able to distinguish between minor annoyances and fighting matters.
The mayor was losing control, and he knew it. He was breathing heavier than usual and the sweat stain beneath his armpits was spreading. Soon the parrots would be soaked as well. She hoped he wasn't about to have a heart attack. At least there were a couple of doctors and nurses present. There was a county paramedic truck parked out back, too. A defibrillator readily available.
Dottie Truder took her seat and a teacher from the high school stepped up to the microphone in the aisle. "We keep hearing that our police force is doing its best, Mayor Tugman, but
frankly, I feel as if we're getting a lot of talk and not seeing a lot of action." His gaze darted in Claire's direction, then back at Morris. "I have wife and a daughter to be concerned about, and, damn it, excuse my curse, but I don't want talk. I want results."
More clapping. Some slaps on the back as the calculus teacher returned to his chair.
Claire took one look at John Carter's back as he retreated and decided enough was enough. She rose from her green plastic kiddy chair and the room instantly grew quiet. Faces all turned toward her. Morris, spouting some pointless political mumbo jumbo in reply to Carter's comment, halted mid-sentence.
No one expected Claire to speak in her own defense. She was here to merely decorate the mayor's dais, hold down one of the plastic chairs. Her friends and neighbors, the men and women she attended church with each Sunday, hadn't expected her to respond to their disparagement.
A few with good enough manners to be embarrassed now sat down. Someone coughed, cleared his throat. Jenna Talbot's baby was shushed with a pacifier.
Claire focused on the orange basketball hoop above Dr. George Larson's head as she walked slowly to the podium. A prominent physician in town, he'd become one of her greatest adversaries, or so she'd heard through the grapevine. She raised the height of the microphone six inches and leaned over it. "You know who I am, so we'll dispense with introductions and I'll get right to the point."
The gymnasium was so quiet that she could hear raindrops pattering against the glass of the west parking lot doors.
"While I can't go into the details of the investigation, for obvious reasons," she said calmly, "I want you to know that our police force has made progress and that the state is, as we speak, convening a task force to aid us in catching this killer." She gripped the podium as she met the gazes of several of her most obvious opponents. She relaxed a little. "And we will catch him. Now, in the meantime, there are some steps we can all take to..."
* * *
The Bloodsucker, surrounded by fellow citizens of Albany Beach, pretended to listen conscientiously to Chief Drummond as she reviewed the safety measures the women of the town needed to use. But his attention wavered.
He was delighted to be in the midst of the crowd and actually hear them all speak of him. The killer. This monster. Some were still even calling him "Bloody Bob," the silly name a newspaper reporter had given him. The Bloodsucker kept all the news articles he could find. He was even buying the national weekly newsmagazines at the local newsstand, just in case he was mentioned there.
Chief Drummond, his Claire Bear, said something the men and women surrounding him approved of and they clapped. Nodded. He clapped with them, even going so far as to meet the gaze of the lady who cashed his paycheck, and nodded. A woman he worked with spotted him and gave a little wave. The Bloodsucker waved back.
They thought they knew so much. But they were wrong. Dorothy Truder was wrong. It wasn't five. It was six. He smiled to himself at the secret he had in the barn. Well, it wouldn't be a secret much longer, not once he finished with Brandy tonight and took out the trash...
The police chief continued to speak and he continued to clap, nod and acknowledge others around him in the metal chairs, as if he were one of them. They believed in their hearts that he was one of them. That's what made the whole event even more exciting.
The Bloodsucker was so glad he had decided to leave Brandy in the barn and come tonight. Granny had said he was stupid, but he wasn't, and this was proof once again. Right here on the gym floor. They were clapping for him. Conceding his superior intelligence.
Granny said he was an idiot, a nobody and a nothing. A speck of fly dirt on the wall. But she was wrong, and here was the proof. He had the citizens of his hometown all fooled, and not just the stupid ones who swept floors or pumped gas for a living. He had the doctors, the teachers, the business owners, even the cops, hoodwinked.
The Bloodsucker smiled to himself. And deceiving Police Chief Claire Bear was the best of all.
* * *
Claire heard the blaring rock music before her log cabin, at the end of the quarter mile of wooded lane, came into view. She didn't recognize the artist, but she was certain the band used only lowercase letters, and that there would be snakes and skulls on their CD covers. Her fifteen-year-old daughter Ashley had gone Goth in the spring, and that had been the end of rock and roll as Claire knew it, in their household.
"What do you think you're doing playing music that loud, Ashley Anne Drummond?" Claire muttered, guiding the police cruiser up the lane, through the dark woods. The rain had stopped, but the trees still hung heavy with moisture and the gravel road was muddy. "Thank God we haven't got any neighbors; they'd be calling the cops."
She chuckled at her bad joke. On a day like the one she'd had today, she'd take any joke she could get, no matter how weak.
Claire made the bend in the driveway, around the grandfather oak tree she hadn't had the heart to cut down when she'd put in the new driveway, and the solar-heated log cabin came into sight. The cabin with music blasting, every light in the house lit. The cabin with eight to ten cars parked all over her lawn. Cars that only teenagers would dare drive.
"I'll kill her." Claire pulled up beside a dented Ford pickup she recognized as Ashley's boyfriend's and slammed on the brakes. "I'll close my hands around her neck and put her out of my misery," she mumbled as she climbed out of the car. "No jury of my peers, of parents of teenagers, would dare convict me."
"Cops are here!"
Claire heard someone sound the alarm before she reached the front porch. The door opened and two young men dressed alike in black pants and black T-shirts, their hair spiked and dyed black, nearly collided with her on the front steps.
"Chief Drummond," the braver of the two muttered.
"Joshua." She nodded, giving him her best bad ass bitch cop eye. "Your dad know you're here without an adult present"—she spotted a beer can in the other boy's hand—"drinking underage?" Josh's father was the Presbyterian minister in town. Great guy.
"Um... he knows I was out with Jimmy." He indicated the kid trying to figure out how to make a Pabst Blue Ribbon can he held behind his back disappear into thin air.
She reached around him and plucked the beer from his hand. She tipped the can and watered her flower bed with the remainder of the contents. "You been drinking, Josh?"
He shook his head.
She leaned closer. "Breathe."
Obviously embarrassed, but unable to find a way out of his predicament, he exhaled.
Claire didn't smell beer on his breath. "You drive home," she ordered, pointing toward the cars. "You see Jimmy gets safely to his house and we forget this happened."
Josh kept his gaze downcast, further obscured by a mop of unnaturally inky hair. "Um, it's Jimmy's car and he has to be home by eleven-thirty."
"I don't care if it's the Apostle Paul's car." Claire gave him the eye again. "You drive him home. You put him to bed and then you figure out how to get home yourself." She settled her hand on her sidearm. "Or, I could call your dad and see if he'd like to meet us down at the station and—"
"I'll drive him home." Josh rushed down the steps, past her.
"Key's in the ignition," Jimmy said, right behind his buddy.
"Thanks, Chief," Josh hollered as he climbed into a beat up sedan with an amateur two-tone paint job.
She raised the empty beer can in salute as she crossed the porch. She was just opening the front door when she saw a guy and two girls dart out from the shadows of the house and race for a car. "You better not get behind the wheel of that car if you've been drinking, Ryan Carlisle," she shouted, not even bothering to look over her shoulder at them.
"I haven't been, Chief Drummond. Good night, Chief Drummond."
She heard car doors slam and an engine sputter and start as she walked in the front door of her humble abode. Her living room, kitchen and dining room were littered with chip bags, water bottles and a few empty beer cans.
Someone had c
ourteously turned down the music, but Claire reached around a young lady with a double nose ring to hit the power button on her stereo and then set down the empty beer can still in her hand.
A dozen teens, all dressed in black with dyed black hair, stared at her.
"Shit," someone muttered. "I thought Jimmy was just messing around about the cops again. She wasn't supposed to be home until late."
Claire's gaze fell on her daughter who was busy trying to ease an empty beer can under the couch with the heel of her black hightop Converse sneaker.
"I told you she hasn't been home before midnight this week," Ashley muttered under her breath.
"True," Claire admitted, gazing at the teens one by one, recognizing most of the faces. Ashley's boyfriend, Chain, was there, of course. Claire didn't know him well, but she didn't like him. Not one bit. She didn't like the clothes he wore or the head shop he worked in at the boardwalk. She didn't care what his sad story was; raised by his grandmother who was now ill and in a nursing home or some such crap. She didn't care how many times a day Ashley said he visited her; the kid was no good. He couldn't be.
Shauna Clemson, daughter of a dentist in town, was there, too. She'd gone Goth with Ashley this spring. Claire knew for a fact that her parents were so thrilled with the change in their daughter that they were talking about sending her to boarding school in Connecticut. Then there was Ashley's new best friend, also an Ashley. They'd met through Chain. They called themselves the A twins.
Claire knew her veins had to be standing out on her forehead. "I suppose it would be silly for me to ask what's going on here," she said, barely controlling her temper. But she didn't yell; Ashley found it disrespectful when she yelled.
"Mom—"
"I think I'd keep my mouth shut right now, Ash," Claire interrupted sharply. "Something about just digging the hole deeper?"
She'll Never Live Page 2
