Blood Indulgence: a serial killer thriller (Phineas and Liam Book 3)

by V. J. Chambers

  This time, the video didn’t make her feel aroused, not with Liam sitting there. It made her feel sick to her stomach. It was invasive, filming him without his consent. And even if he’d willingly acquiesced to everything he was doing in the video, he hadn’t realized that Finn was a serial killer back then. Seeing it now, it must make Liam feel disgusting.

  “Why did she send you this?” said Liam. “What does she want?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dawson. “But she wants my attention. She killed a woman when I told her that she wasn’t my jurisdiction.”

  “How did she even get it?” said Liam. “If Finn filmed it, why did he give it to her?” He turned to Dawson. “Hey, have you gotten him to talk more about his relationship with her?”

  “He’s pretty tight-lipped,” she said.

  “Why do you think he was begging me to kill him in that beach house when he captured us both, and that now he’s trying to get the death penalty taken off the table?”

  “Gotta be control?” She shrugged. She tilted her head at the screen, looking at the girl that Liam said was named Cora, who was running her fingers over the mens’ chests. “Getting you to kill him is its own victory, but getting a lethal injection is a defeat. That girl… she looks familiar to me.”

  “Really?” said Liam.

  “How’d you know her?”

  “Uh, didn’t,” said Liam. “She was just in the room when we got there.”

  “But you know her name. You never talked to her again?”

  “I might have seen her on campus afterwards?” He wasn’t sure of this. “Maybe I’d met her before?” He leaned forward and picked up the mouse and spun things forward.

  “Oh, you’re skipping things?”

  “There’s nothing to see except thrusting at this point.”

  She squinted as the images went by on the screen super fast with no sound. The three bodies were just kind of mushed together there for a while. And then they broke apart and Liam stopped the video.

  “Whoa,” he said, “I forgot that I had sex with her too.”

  “You’ve all been having sex this whole time.”

  “You know what I mean,” said Liam. He grimaced, and then he spun this forward too, which consisted of his mouth on Slater again while Liam was inside Cora.

  “Did you do this a lot in college? Threesomes? You’re kind of adventurous, aren’t you?”

  “The word you’re looking for is ‘slut,’” he muttered. He let go of the mouse and sat back, and the sound came back, which was rhythmic and full of breathy sounds.

  “Don’t call yourself that,” said Dawson. “I fully own up to being really boring sexually.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, you were boring all right, what with transitioning and all that.”

  “Well, that process did not actually lead to a lot of interest from other people in wanting me or whatever.”

  He glanced at her, something sympathetic in his expression.

  “Don’t pity me,” she said. “There are no videos floating around of me in my twenties with two other people, so if anyone needs pity, it’s you.”

  He reached out and shut off the video. “Touche.”

  “Sorry,” she said, feeling defeated.

  “I think it’s the only threesome I ever had,” he said. “Besides with Destiny, obviously. I went to a couple sessions with a therapist a few months back, and he said that I was probably dealing with the sexual trauma by being promiscuous and that it was my way of feeling as though I had control over my body again?”

  Dawson didn’t know what to say to that.

  “But… obviously… it’s sort of not really control,” he said. “Because I make all these destructive decisions and then I’m, like, trapped by my own actions. I have all these consequences.”

  On the screen, Cora’s face was frozen in place. Dawson stared at that, and tried to think of how to respond to what Liam was saying.

  “So, when you’re saying I’m adventurous, it’s really… like I’m dealing with PTSD or something? It can make you really stupid about risk. You can overprotect yourself against some risks and underprotect yourself against others.”

  “Liam,” she whispered.

  “I know this is not probably making you feel comfortable with me being a father, but seriously, Dawson—”

  “I’m still not ready to talk about that,” she said. “And that Cora person? I think she’s the third body in the freezer.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  LIAM’S hands were shaking. He was standing behind Dawson’s chair as she pulled up police pictures, which had been taken of the bodies in the freezer that they’d found in that old house that Trina Manning had taken them to.

  Two of the bodies had missing limbs. They’d been part of the bouquet of limbs that had been left for them to find in an old warehouse. They had been identified already.

  But this third victim, no one had known who she was.

  And now, looking at the pictures of the girl, wrapped in plastic, her features frozen and blackened, he could see that it was Cora all right. He would never have noticed before, but then he hadn’t looked too closely at the dead bodies because dead bodies unnerved him.

  “She was the one who was pregnant,” Dawson was saying. “And the dating on the freezing of her, she’s been in that freezer for a very long time, which could mean that—”

  “No,” said Liam. His heart stopped.

  “She was like two months along,” said Dawson.

  “No, Haysle, please don’t tell me that you think that she was pregnant with my…” He couldn’t even say the word. His internal organs seemed to be moving into improper places. He gripped the back of her chair too tightly.

  She leaned her head back to look at him. “I don’t know. The time line might match up is all.”

  “If she was in that freezer, she was Destiny’s victim,” said Liam. “Destiny might have put her up to it. You know, she orchestrated the whole thing with Finn and me before, and she was always, you know, trying to make us kiss and stuff.”

  Don’t be selfish, tiger. Your girl wants a show.

  “It could be Slater’s,” she said. “I mean, he was first.”

  “I’m going to throw up now,” he said in a strained voice, and he did feel nauseous, but he also didn’t think he could stand up if he let go of the back of this chair, so he just stood there, gripping it, trying to breathe.

  Dawson reached back and patted his hand. “Sorry, Liam. I’ll get this figured out, okay?”

  “WHY did we never test the DNA of the freezer victim number three’s fetus against Slater?” said Dawson.

  Anthony Frisk was on the other side of the lab, bent over a body. He was wearing plastic gloves and the fingers were stained red. “Hello to you, too, Detective Dawson. It’s been a long time, but I’m doing well, thanks for asking, and I think your greeting technique is really improving.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “How are you?”

  “We did this,” said Frisk.

  She sighed.

  “The victim was about two months along,” said Frisk. “And we were under the impression that Slater probably didn’t even kill her, because it was found in that freezer, and you told me that she was a victim of Destiny Worth. Also, if she had been killed by Slater, it wouldn’t have matched his profile to kill someone he’d been sleeping with for months. That wasn’t his thing. He only screwed bodies, am I right?”

  “Well, can you test it now?” she said.

  “Yup, we’ve got samples,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “And, um, you have a DNA profile from Liam Emerson, right?”

  “We do,” said Frisk, raising his eyebrows.

  “Test the fetus against him too.”

  “For paternity?”

  “Yes,” she said. Obviously. “Thanks, Anthony.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what this is all about, are you?”

  “Nope,” she said, shaking her head.

  LIAM did not under
stand how he had this many Facebook friends.

  He’d been on the platform since his twenties, so he supposed it made sense that he did, but it was strange to him to think that the social media site had been such an institution in his life for so long. It still felt to him like it was a sort of new thing. But Facebook was ancient, just like him.

  Anyway, there was a search function, and he’d searched for Cora, but she hadn’t come up.

  He knew that sometimes people didn’t call themselves by their real names on social media—something that had been more common years ago—and he also knew that sometimes, when people went missing or died, their social media accounts were left intact so that their loved ones could write on their wall on anniversaries and holidays. It was a form of comfort.

  So, anyway, he thought it was possible that he was Facebook friends with Cora, and that he should search through his entire friend list to try to find her.

  If she was on his friends list, he could maybe find out her last name, and they could really identify her.

  But he had a lot of Facebook friends, nearly four hundred, and it was taking a long time to go through all of them. He felt the need to thoroughly investigate anyone whose profile picture was not of their face or was too small to make out.

  That was a lot, because most of his friends seemed to think that they should make their profile pictures them with their kids.

  Maybe he would feel the same way if he had a kid. He didn’t know.

  But that made him think of the idea that Destiny Worth had murdered his unborn child inside of Cora—whose last name he didn’t know—and how screwed up was the entire situation? How do you knock up a girl whose last name you don’t know? How do you do it in such a way that you can’t even be sure it’s your kid?

  He wanted to kill Destiny.

  Oddly, he hadn’t dealt with his emotions toward the woman, not truly. He was still trying to come to terms with the fact that she was alive.

  But now, in this moment, he wanted to kill her for real. He’d spent most of his life feeling guilty about killing her, but now he wished she was actually dead.

  His phone rang.

  It was Dawson.

  He put it on speaker and continued scrolling through his friends list. “Hey.”

  “I found Cora,” she said.

  He stopped scrolling. “You did?”

  “Yeah, I looked through alumni records for Branwen University, and I found her. Get this. Her last name is Manning.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “And she shares a home address with another Manning. Trina Manning, who it seems is her sister.”

  “Her sister led us to the freezer where her remains were being stored?”

  “Yes.”

  THEY were back on the road.

  Dawson was driving again, and this time they were headed to Trina Manning’s home in Maryland. “She was so nervous. She kept saying that she didn’t want to talk to me and that she needed a lawyer and she tried to shut us out.”

  “Yeah, she said we had a class together, and that seemed to soothe her, but—”

  “Checked into that. Not true. Her schedule was searchable, and so was yours, and she and you never had a class together.”

  “So… she lied.”

  “I think she lied about a lot of things. It never made any sense, why she was so worried about her guilt and then she didn’t have any, not really. I don’t know why it didn’t raise red flags for me all along.”

  “She did run away from us pretty fast,” said Liam.

  “I assumed she was just freaked out about being back in that place,” said Dawson.

  “So did I.”

  “So, look, it’s obvious that both Trina and her sister were in deep with Worth and her group of sycophants. Followers. Whatever we’re calling them.”

  “If Destiny set Cora up to seduce me and Slater, then later convinced her to sacrifice herself or… I don’t know. You know that Finn told me that Destiny would give him dead bodies for his own perverted use. And that when she stopped, that’s when he started killing women.”

  “I do remember that,” said Dawson. “But why are you bringing that up, because wasn’t that later? During this time period, he didn’t even know Worth was alive.”

  “Maybe not,” said Liam. “Or maybe so. I don’t know if I believe anything he says, of course. I’m saying maybe Finn liked her and wanted to screw her again, but this time, do it the way he liked to screw women—dead.”

  “Is that typical for him? To want to go back for seconds?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she seduce you?” said Dawson. “Because you told me she was just in the room. Who approached you with this idea of the three of you all having sex, anyway?”

  “Uh, Finn, I guess. Maybe technically, he seduced me. But, it’s kind of fuzzy, because I was drunk. Which seems to be a refrain for that part of my life.”

  “That’s a refrain for everyone’s time in college,” said Dawson. “If you remember college too clearly, you did it wrong.”

  He snorted.

  “Anyway, I just don’t understand why she kills people at all. Like, for Slater, it’s this weird sexual thing. And I can’t deny that there’s some sexual component that motivates Worth. But I feel as though she’s mostly interested in men sexually, and most of her victims—all of her victims at this point, unless we count her dad, and we don’t know that he’s dead—are women. So, what’s that about?”

  “You’re the one who told me this is all about power.”

  “Yeah, it’s very sick,” she said. “Like, that must be the ultimate power for her, to get someone to sacrifice their life for her, and so she just likes pushing people as far as she can. She pushed you and Slater all the time, and she’s obviously brainwashed all of these people. I get the impression her brother is terrified of her. She’s… God, she’s evil.”

  When they finally reached Trina’s house, they were both tired from driving.

  They got out of the car and stretched before they made their way up the walk to Trina’s house.

  Dawson knocked on the door.

  They waited.

  No one came to the door.

  They knocked again.

  Still nothing.

  After a while, they began walking around the house and looking in the windows, which was when they realized that the house was empty and that the refrigerator in the kitchen had been defrosted and stood open.

  Trina was gone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “UM, sorry, say again?” the woman at the front desk had long, purple-tipped nails that she drummed against the desk top. “What was the name?”

  “Trina Manning,” said Dawson. “She works here. Well, she did, anyway.”

  “Oh, Trina, right,” said the woman. “Yes, she quit about six months ago.”

  “Right after we came here and talked to her,” said Liam.

  “Did she say why she was quitting?”

  “Family issues, I think,” said the woman. “Maybe cancer?” She cringed in sympathy.

  “Did she leave a forwarding address?” said Dawson.

  “Um, I can’t just give that out.”

  Dawson got out her badge.

  “Oh!” The woman’s artfully-shaped eyebrows shot up. “Well, let me look, then, officer. So sorry.” She sat down and typed on the computer, managing it magnificently with those nails, which astounded Dawson. She shook her head. “Sorry, there’s nothing here. I can give you the address she was living at?”

  “We’ve been there,” said Dawson. “You have a phone number for her?”

  “Sure,” said the woman. She scribbled it down on a small pad of paper and then ripped off the sheet to hand it over. “Sorry I’m not more help. Is Trina all right? Is she in some kind of trouble?”

  “If she gets in touch, give me a call,” said Dawson, giving the woman her card.

  Once they left the building, Dawson immediately tried the phone number.

  And
got a message that the number had been disconnected.

  Figured.

  “Nothing?” said Liam.

  “Disconnected,” she said.

  He sighed.

  It was late afternoon now, and she didn’t relish another long drive home. By the time they got back, it would be the middle of the night, anyway. She turned to look at him. “I don’t feel like driving back tonight. Let’s just get a hotel room. We can deal with all of this tomorrow.”

  He shifted on his feet, not meeting her gaze. “I could drive.”

  “I don’t want to be in a car for hours again either,” she said. “Plus, I’m hungry, and I don’t relish eating fast food.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be overnight in a hotel with you again,” he said.

  This hurt her for some reason. She might have winced.

  “Not unless we talk,” he said.

  She let out an annoyed sound.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not trying to pressure you or whatever. I know you said you’re not ready to talk—”

  “I will not come to your room tonight, okay? I don’t even want to, now that you’re being like this.”

  “Come on, Haysle, let me drive.”

  “It’s my car,” she said. “So, it’s my decision. You want to go home, find your own way home.”

  LIAM wasn’t sure if he could charge room service to the room, since the CCPD was footing the bill. He figured it was okay, but he also knew there was a certain allowance per day for meals, and he wasn’t sure how much it was.

  There was a knock on his hotel room door.

  He yanked it open. “I thought you weren’t going to come to my room.”

  Dawson shrugged. “You want to get dinner? The restaurant attached to this place is Italian. I could stand some comfort food. Big bowl of pasta? What do you think?”

  Tell her no, because she’s confusing you, and you need to protect yourself. God knows, your own crazy is enough to deal with. You can’t deal with whatever her issues are too.

  “Pasta sounds good,” he said.