She'll Never Live

by Hunter Morgan

  What was out there? Who was out there?

  "Claire?" Graham said. "You all right?"

  "Yeah," she said slowly, as she stared in the direction of the shed, waiting for another zigzag of lightning. "Fine, I just—" She didn't finish her sentence.

  "You just what?"

  "I don't know." She blinked. Rubbed her eyes. Lightning flashed again and this time, she saw nothing out of the ordinary in the yard. There was nothing there. She was just tired. She let the drape fall and thunder rumbled. "I'm sorry, Graham," she said, gripping the phone tightly. "Listen, I've been thinking." She paced the living room floor, shifting her focus. This was silly, she wasn't the jumpy type. The doors and windows were locked. For heaven's sake, she had a Beretta semiautomatic pistol. No one was coming through the door.

  "Your sister, the one with the FBI."

  "Paige."

  "Yeah. You said the other day that you thought she might be able to help me with some profiling on this guy."

  "I could ask. Give her a call tomorrow and get right back to you."

  Claire smiled. She was glad Graham had called. He'd made her feel better about Ashley, about herself. "That would be great. Listen, I better go. I should try to get some sleep."

  "Sure, well, listen, I'm glad everything is fine out there. But if you need anything..."

  She chuckled. "Graham. I'm a police officer. I carry a gun."

  "Right." He laughed. "Well, if I need anything—"

  "Be sure to call me."

  They were both silent for a moment. She wanted to say something... personal. About how she was feeling about him right now. About how much she wanted to be with him. But it just didn't seem right. Not now, not with everything that was going on.

  "'Night," Claire said softly. She hung up the phone and tossed it on the couch. Then she grabbed one of the chunky candles and the vodka and orange juice glass off the end table. At the kitchen sink, she poured out the drink and watched it swirl down the drain. She glanced up at the closed curtain on the window.

  She had the strangest feeling that she was being watched.

  * * *

  Agitated, the Bloodsucker paced the small living room he had filled with lit candles. The electricity had gone out almost an hour ago and he was missing the end of the movie he'd been watching about a woman who had given up her baby for adoption, then wanted it back.

  He was upset that he didn't get to see the end of the movie. He knew how it should end, how it would end if he had written the screenplay. The mother shouldn't get the baby back; it should stay with the nice family in the white house with the picket fence. The mother should be sent to death row for giving up her child. Executed by lethal injection, maybe firing squad except that no one used a firing squad to execute anymore in the United States. Gary Gilmore had been the last to be executed by firing squad in Utah in 1977. He'd learned all about it on an A&E special.

  The Bloodsucker reached the far wall of the living room, turned and started back again. He felt jumpy tonight, as if he'd had too much caffeine. Like he needed... needed...

  He flexed his hands at his sides. He was angry again tonight, agitated, and he didn't know why. He kept thinking about his mother. The old photo in his breast pocket.

  He was angry with her.

  No. He shook his head vigorously, trying to rid himself of that thought. That terrible, awful thought. It was Granny who made him angry. Granny who had called him names. Who had punished him.

  Lightning illuminated the dreary room and he flinched. He had never liked storms; they scared him. He counted the way he had learned as a kid. "One, one thousand, two, one thousand," he murmured, "three, one thousand, four, one thousand."

  Thunder rumbled at last.

  Four miles away. The storm was four miles away and moving southeast.

  The Bloodsucker turned like a soldier and walked in the opposite direction again.

  Max, good old Max, lifted his head from his paws, looked at his master with those big, soulful brown eyes of his and laid his head down again. Max wasn't afraid of storms. But then, he hadn't known Granny.

  Feeling chilled, the Bloodsucker wrapped his arms around himself. He'd been thinking a lot about Ashley, the police chief's daughter. She was pretty. Strong. He admired her strength. She was smart, too. The dark eyeliner, the black hair, it didn't fool him for a minute.

  He had a feeling Ashley wouldn't be like the other women. She would be different. Her mother just didn't appreciate her; didn't realize what a jewel she was. It was Ashley's strength, her determination that made her so different from other teenagers. Maybe it could make him different.

  But Ashley would be tricky. She wasn't working any longer. She wouldn't be walking from the garden store to the diner anymore. Claire Bear had seen to that. And the house, it was locked airtight, windows and doors. Then there was the alarm to contend with.

  The Bloodsucker began to relax, the tension easing in the back of his neck. Ashley would be a challenge. It would take some forethought. Not a task to be taken impulsively.

  But his need was building. He could feel it deep inside. Feel it inside his pants.

  Stupid. Worthless.

  The words came out of nowhere and echoed in his head.

  Insignificant. Dimwitted.

  It was as if someone was shouting at him. He covered his ears. Ducked. It was Granny shouting at him. Accusing. Demeaning.

  No. It was someone else's voice he heard. But whose?

  He slid down into his chair, cradling his head. His forearms were beginning to burn.

  "No," he sobbed as tears filled his eyes.

  Max whined and got off the old carpet. He walked over to the Bloodsucker and rested his head on his master's knee—pushed with his cold nose.

  The Bloodsucker could still hear the words being shouted at him. Swirling around him like a whirlwind of dry leaves and sticks, beating him, licking him. But they were getting softer, moving farther away, like the storm.

  "Thata boy," the Bloodsucker crooned, rubbing Max's head. Scratching him behind his ears. "What a good boy you are."

  * * *

  Three days later, Claire found a "While You Were Out" pink slip on her desk when she returned from a meeting with the mayor.

  Morris had wanted an update on her investigation and he had not been pleased to hear that she still did not have enough evidence to arrest anyone. He became even less pleased with her when she asked if it would be all right if she asked him a couple of questions concerning his own whereabouts the nights the dead women went missing. He'd practically thrown her out of his office, insisting he would answer no questions without her officially bringing him in for questioning and only then in the presence of his lawyer.

  Claire doubted Morris was the killer. Considering his size and the fact that he appeared to be a heart attack waiting to happen, she didn't think he possessed the strength that would be necessary to subdue the women or lift them in and out of a vehicle. Still, his Peeping Tom arrest in Florida remained in the back of her mind. What if he had an accomplice?

  On her way out of the mayor's office, he had warned her that whatever she thought she had on him, she was wrong. He didn't care what her sources were. He said he would slap her with a lawsuit if she so much as breathed her unfounded suspicions.

  Morris knew she knew about the incident in Florida and it had him scared. That didn't make him the killer.

  Paige Howard had also called, according to Jewel's note, penned in purple ink. A phone number with a Virginia area code, where she could be reached, had been included. It was Graham's sister, the FBI agent. Graham had contacted her the day after he and Claire talked about getting assistance from a profiler. Claire had then spoken briefly to Paige who had requested that copies of the files and photos be faxed to the FBI offices in Quantico for analysis.

  Claire felt a little flutter of hope as she sat in her chair and reached for her notepad. She dialed the number, followed by the extension.

  "Special Agent Howard
," said the pleasant voice on the other end of the line. Paige sounded more like a receptionist in a doctor's office than an FBI agent.

  "Special Agent Howard, it's Claire Drummond in Delaware."

  "Please, call me Paige. Every time I hear someone call me Special Agent Howard I hear the X-Files theme song in my head," she said with a chuckle.

  Claire smiled. She liked this young woman; Graham had said she would. "And I'm Claire." She fiddled with her pen, clicking the point in and out. "I wasn't expecting to hear from you so soon. You said a week."

  "Well, after looking over the case myself, I passed it to one of our profilers right away. You've got one sick coconut there."

  "Yeah, don't I know it." Claire sighed. "So you've got something for me?"

  "I do. I'll fax the report to you, but I thought you might want to hear what Katie thinks."

  "Katie?"

  "Special Agent Katelyn Carmelle, the profiler."

  Claire clicked her pen again, ready to take notes. "Go ahead, I'm listening."

  "Well, your killer is very intelligent, possible genius IQ level. He's average-looking, attractive, but not movie-star good looks. He blends in well in a crowd so you're not hunting for the creepy guy who looks like he's a killer."

  Claire wrote AVERAGE JOE in caps on the paper in front of her. Beneath it, she added SMART.

  "Now this is pretty typical," Paige continued, "but you've got a loner here."

  "Like most serial killers, right." Claire had done some reading herself, plus her years of experience just told her this guy didn't have a lot of pals or close family members. It made it easier for no one to be aware of his clandestine behavior.

  "But, Katie notes that this guy is a little different. He's a loner, but he's not the obvious loner. He's not necessarily sitting by himself in a restaurant. People know him, or think they do. He knows people. He might belong to clubs, go to classes. He might be the guy who makes everyone laugh in the lunchroom," Paige said. "He's an outsider who definitely wants in. He wants to be a part of the group, of society, but something prevents it."

  Claire drew a circle with an arrow pointing in. This was a line of reasoning she hadn't concluded on her own. "He wants a friend?" she asked, trying to establish the killer's personality in her mind.

  "Exactly. And he wants female friends, according to Katie."

  "How'd she come to that conclusion?"

  "Well, now mind you, I'm not in the behavioral science department. I'm strictly a number cruncher, but from what she says here, it has something to do with him not killing the women right away."

  "According to our estimated times of death, he's definitely keeping them alive for a while," Claire said, becoming more excited by the moment. The information the FBI was providing could very well be what could lead her to this guy. "The ME upstate says he's bleeding them slowly. That's why the cuts on the wrists are shallow. Why he cuts them again and again. To delay the death, but that also means he's prolonging their life."

  "Exactly," Paige agreed. "According to Katie, there's no way to say for sure, but he's doing something with them before he kills them. Maybe he plays house with them, maybe he just sits and watches TV with them. It's about a fantasy with these guys. They have a fantasy they're trying to reenact again and again."

  Claire halted, pen poised. "I don't understand. What do you mean play house?"

  "Maybe he pretends the women are his girlfriend, wife, even mother," Paige explained. "Maybe he sets up a little faux household where she brings him his paper, pours him coffee. He, of course, has to force her, but that's a minor inconvenience to a man like this. You see, Claire, he's keeping them alive so that he can create some kind of bond with them, however temporary. He wants these women to be his friend. Love him, if you will, if only for a few minutes."

  "It's his fantasy to be loved by these women?" Claire set her pen down, trying to process the information Paige was providing. Trying to understand. "But he's bleeding them to death while he's playing out this cozy little fantasy."

  "That's the part Katie can't figure out. It's a little odd, even for a whack-job serial killer."

  Claire paused for a moment, thinking. "Now, you saw that the last victim had two puncture wounds on her neck—like a vampire bite, right?" She halted, then started again, her mind going a mile a minute. "You think this could be a cult thing?"

  "Very doubtful. Cult murders are weird, all right, but different than this."

  Claire nodded. Chain still wasn't entirely off the hook with her, but she knew it was very likely he was not her man. "Okay, here's a question for you. Has he killed before these women? Also, what about the violence? This is the first victim we think he's hit."

  "Both good questions. Hard to say if he's ever killed; sometimes we find that these killers murdered once or twice in the past. That's when they get a taste for it. But something triggered this string of murders. He's definitely running what we call hot right now. He's on a streak, for whatever reason."

  Claire could hear Paige rustling through papers.

  "The escalation of violence is pretty typical, although it's not typical that he didn't injure them at all, per se—"

  "Except the cutting and bleeding them to death part," Claire cut in.

  "I told you, you have a sick bastard here. Now, he probably hit this victim because something changed."

  "You mean she was the first one to try to fight him? I find that hard to believe."

  "So do I," Paige said thoughtfully. "No, I think something is changing in him. Something is pissing him off. Most likely, the killings aren't as satisfying as they first were. That's pretty typical. They, more or less, have to do more, after a while, to get their thrill."

  Claire stopped taking notes and leaned back in her chair. "Okay, one more question and then I'll let you go. I've already taken enough of your time."

  "It's no problem, really. I'm just tickled my brother has shown some interest in... the case," she said quickly.

  Claire smiled. "What does Katie think he's doing with the blood?"

  Again, Claire heard the rustle of paper.

  "She doesn't say."

  "This is going to sound bizarre, but... could he possibly be drinking it? I mean, what else could be the significance of the bite on the neck?"

  Paige was quiet for a second. "I guess that's a possibility. We see nutjobs cut off limbs and eat them; drinking blood isn't any weirder. And if he's drinking their blood, that might account for the neatness," she added thoughtfully. "You said all the bodies were clean of blood spatter."

  Claire's stomach gave an involuntary lurch. "Drinking their blood. That's a lot of blood, considering the volume the ME thinks the victims lost before dying."

  "Pretty gross, huh?" Paige remarked. "But remember, the drinking of the blood could be symbolic. Maybe he's drinking a little and saving the rest."

  Claire chuckled without humor. "Now look who's being gross."

  "Well, what he's doing with the blood is just speculation. That's not really what our profilers do. What they do is take the information they've gleaned from hundreds, thousands of criminals, and compile it. Criminals follow certain patterns for certain reasons. By our providing this information to you, hopefully you can begin looking over your possible suspects and focus on one or two. Often, in these kinds of cases, local law enforcement has a good idea who the killer is, it's just a matter of getting enough circumstantial evidence together to warrant surveillance and search warrants for property."

  Claire talked with Paige for another five minutes, thanked her and hung up to wait for the fax with the details of the information the FBI profiler had compiled. As she waited, she jotted down the names of her possible suspects: Mayor Tugman, Seth Watkins. Below their names, she added José and his uncle, listing them as one suspect, and Chain. As she thought about what Paige had said, she wondered if she needed to add another name to the list.

  Ryan McCormick was an excellent police officer. He also lived alone outside of town in a rente
d house and was someone any woman in town would trust, simply because of his occupation. And women liked him. They liked the tight abs and bulging biceps. He could be a charmer, but there was something about him that was standoffish. As if he thought he was smarter than everyone else. He was also into kinky sex, or at least what Graham's store clerks considered kinky. And he had been the first on the scene when four of the six women had been discovered. Did he have bad luck or did he know the women were there?

  Claire didn't want to consider her officer as a suspect. Not a man she had trusted, not just with her own life and the lives of the men and women she was responsible for, but Ashley's, too. On more than one occasion, she had allowed McCormick to pick her daughter up from school, drop her off at the dentist or at Claire's parents' house. Suspecting Chain had already forced her to consider that she might have allowed Ashley to ride in a car with a murderer, but the possibility that that murderer could be McCormick was somehow worse.

  Claire hesitated, then quickly jotted Ryan's name down. Before she had time to cross it off, she got up from her desk to go check on Ashley in the break room that had become her daytime prison cell. Then checked to see if her fax had come in. She felt as if time was running out, maybe because of the impending task force; she didn't know. What she did know was that she had to find the killer, a man she sensed was watching her.

  * * *

  The Bloodsucker sat at the traffic light and observed the tourists moving in a herd at the crosswalk. Everyone said tourism was down this year, by as much as thirty percent. True or not, there still seemed to be plenty of strangers available to him.

  As he watched them cross the street, the word lemmings came to mind. Lemmings following one another off a cliff. He had recently read that the notion of lemmings committing suicide by hurling themselves off a cliff was a myth, a myth perpetuated by a Disney documentary in the fifties. But he liked the analogy anyway.

  He returned his attention to the sunburned swarm. There were couples pushing beach buggies weighted down with coolers and beach chairs and boogie boards, dragging kids behind them. Pushing strollers. An old woman he knew from the grocery store slowly pedaled her big trike across the street in front of him, seemingly oblivious to the traffic, the sun or age creeping up on her. The plastic orange flag on the back of the bike snapped in the breeze.