Probably not. As far as Milo knew, he was the only person in the world gifted—cursed?—with this strange psychic ability to experience random slices of people’s lives served up in his head like the devil’s home movies.
More to the point, if Rae Ann realized her life span was down to minutes, a couple of hours at the most, she would most likely not be sitting there in relative calm. Milo had learned enough about his guest by now to know she would be doing that amusing writhing, complaining thing he enjoyed so much.
In fact, with that pleasant picture foremost in his mind, Milo decided it was time to get to work. The sooner he finished this little sideshow, the sooner he could begin the main event.
He rose, stretched, and playfully said, “Hey, schoolgirl, guess what the principal has in store for you now?”
He waited and when no response was forthcoming, said, “This is where you say, ‘I don’t know, Principal Milo, what do you have in store for me now?’”
Milo lifted his pliers from his pocket and began snapping the steel jaws for emphasis. Snap, snap, snap. The tactic was effective, the response immediate. Rae Ann’s eyes opened wide in panic and she immediately began chanting, “I don’t know, Principal Milo, what do you have in store for me now?”
At least Milo assumed that was what she was saying. It was hard to be sure, thanks to the muffling effect of the duct tape, which Milo sorely wished he could remove but didn’t dare.
He smiled in appreciation. “That’s more like it. You have the potential to be my best student ever, my little teacher’s pet. Would you like to be my teacher’s pet?”
Rae Ann paused, her confusion evident. She had no idea how to answer the question and Milo could see the wheels turning in her head: Would it be a good thing or a bad thing to be the monster’s teacher’s pet?
He took pity on her, saving her from having to decide. “It doesn’t matter, unfortunately. Something has come up and class is going to have to be cancelled. Permanently, in your case. I would have loved to explore pain management in-depth with you, but the principal has been called away on an emergency—a home tutoring session, you might say—and that means this classroom must be evacuated. Do you understand where I’m going with this? I hope so; you are one of my best students, after all.”
Rae Ann’s expression had become more and more horrified during Milo’s short soliloquy, and now sheer panic took over. She bucked and writhed and tried to scream into her gag, still not accepting after all this time that nothing of any value was going to come from any of it.
Milo concluded that the response meant, yes, she did understand where he was going with this. In fact, he decided she now knew exactly how her short but eventful attendance at Milo University was going to end. And he loved it. The utter, naked terror in her eyes and indeed in her entire body was the biggest turn-on imaginable. He could not understand how everyone else in the world could not be excited by this type of display.
It had to be a classic case of people not realizing what they were missing. If they could see for themselves how enjoyable torturing a helpless victim was, there would be a run on prostitutes not seen in this country since the national conventions of the major political parties, Milo was sure of it.
He readjusted his jeans to provide a little breathing room for his massive erection and got to work, lining up his tools on the floor in the order he expected to use them. The last thing he wanted was to be in the middle of the session and have to bring the slicing and dicing to a grinding halt in order to search out the proper tool. Preparation was essential.
During prep time, Rae Ann provided the most enjoyable background music imaginable. She bucked and she moaned and she begged and all the while, Milo whistled happily, like a man who truly enjoyed his work. Because, of course, he did.
Finally, he was ready. So was Rae Ann, judging from the looks of things. Red splotches covered her face. Tears tracked down her cheeks. Another of those fucking snot bubbles had appeared in her right nostril. Milo decided she must have medical issues, nasally speaking, perhaps a deviated septum from snorting coke.
No matter. The snot problem was easily remedied, and soon Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker would have much bigger things to worry about than hygiene, anyway.
In fact, she already did.
Milo grabbed a tissue and patiently cleaned her face. It was the least he could do, considering the pleasure she was giving him. Besides, what was to come would be much more enjoyable if his guest didn’t look like a disgusting pig.
Wrinkling his own nose, Milo tossed the tissue onto the floor and got started. Soon he was lost in his work, tearing and ripping and stabbing and cutting. Blood flowed and limbs cracked and muffled screams continued with renewed frenzy for a short time, and Milo was glad he had not surrendered to his misguided desire to remove the gag.
Then the screaming died away, and a few minutes after that so did Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker. It was a long time before Milo noticed, and when he did, he didn’t care.
26
Cait tossed clothes into her bag, not bothering to fold them, barely even looking at them. On the bed next to her, Kevin did the same. They had taken some time to play tourist before heading back to Tampa, walking the Freedom Trail and taking a Duck Boat excursion around the city.
“We might as well enjoy the sights,” Kevin had said. “Who knows when we’ll be back here again, if ever?”
For Cait, though, the sightseeing had felt forced and unnatural. Her focus was still solidly on Virginia Ayers and the strange story her long-lost mother had related before politely asking her daughter to butt the hell out of her life and never return.
The whole situation was bizarre. Even if everything she said was true, why kick Cait to the curb now, just hours after meeting her? Virginia claimed she hadn’t seen Cait’s twin brother in thirty years, and as long as he stayed in Seattle or Minnesota or New Mexico or wherever he had ended up, there was no danger anyway.
And if the danger was long past, why couldn’t Virginia have welcomed Cait with open arms? Why reject her outright?
The pain throbbed and pulsed inside her like an infection. If she had known this was how she was going to feel after finally meeting her mother, Cait thought she might have decided to forget about learning her family history. Just let the whole thing drop and go on living in ignorance in Tampa.
But of course she would never have done that. It simply wasn’t in her nature. Cait Connelly had more than once been compared favorably to a bulldog by her fellow lawyers: relentless, unstoppable, moving resolutely forward until either achieving her goal or exhausting every last possibility. It was that personality trait that made the current scenario—packing her bags and returning home before learning her brother’s identity or establishing a relationship with her birth mother—so objectionable.
“Maybe I could…” she began, only to lapse into silence.
“Or what about…”
She realized she had stopped packing and resumed with renewed vigor, taking her frustrations out on her clothing, slamming the offending outfits into the suitcase. Kevin was right. There was no way to force herself on her mother, and if the woman wanted to live in fear of an unrealistic and paranoid scenario, there was nothing she could do about it. Maybe someday the woman would come to her senses. Maybe someday—
—Cait dropped straight down, landing face-first on the bed, falling onto a silk blouse before rolling sideways and crashing to the floor. Her eyes rolled up into her head. She was vaguely aware of Kevin picking her up and cradling her in his arms, calling her name, his panicked voice sounding much too far away, but she was incapable of answering him, incapable even of acknowledging him.
The Flicker roared into her head like a runaway freight train and it was terrifying. The vision was of the man she had seen in yesterday’s awful Flicker. It was the man whose predatory lust had frightened her so badly, the man who had daydreamed about doing twisted, evil, hurtful things to an unsuspecting prostitute with his trusty pair of p
liers. It was the man Cait had wanted to notify the police about, but had not done so because she had no proof.
And this Flicker was one hundred times worse. The man was getting down to business.
Bad business.
The young girl was being held prisoner in what appeared to be a small, nearly empty apartment. The place was dingy and threadbare and littered with trash.
The girl had been immobilized, her arms and legs duct-taped securely to a solid, blocky wooden chair. Several strips of the silver duct tape circled her head and covered her mouth, preventing her from crying out, although it was not for lack of trying.
The girl was being tortured. The man had been fantasizing about using his pliers in the previous Flicker, and now he was doing it. And he was using other implements of torture, too. The scene was horrifying. The girl was naked and covered in blood; it flowed from wounds in at least a dozen different places.
Her captor studied her appraisingly, looking exactly like an artist examining his canvas. He tilted his head sideways. Took a step back. Then he advanced, plunging the pliers into his victim, wielding them like some demented sex toy, ripping and tearing the soft flesh of her inner thighs as she bucked and thrashed. Fresh blood flew, splattering the man’s hands and wrists, dripping down the insides of her legs in thick trails.
Cait wanted to avert her eyes, she tried to avert her eyes, tried to close her eyes to the horror, but she couldn’t, because her eyes didn’t matter. She was seeing the ghastly sight with her mind, and there was no shutting down her mind, no closing her mind to a Flicker. She had no choice but to experience it until it ran its course.
She tried to scream, to cry out for help, but she could not. She wondered if she was going mad, sinking into her own personal hell, where she would live out her days doomed to watching this depraved horror show inside her head.
In the Flicker the man continued his torture. He was relentless, stabbing and slicing. The suffering girl’s head whipped back and forth, her face puffy from crying and blotchy from fear and pain. On the floor her clothes had been scattered like wrapping paper around a toddler’s gifts on Christmas morning. Wounds covered her, large and small, all of them red and raw and angry and weeping blood. There was barely a spot on the girl’s entire body that had not been attacked with the awful pliers or with razor-sharp knives.
Finally the suffering victim’s eyes opened widely in an obscene parody of disbelief, as though it had only now occurred to her that something awful was happening to her. She blinked several times, rapidly, as spasms wracked her body. Her muscles contracted and released and contracted and released again, and then her head lolled to the side and back, eyes closed, mouth agape.
And then she was gone.
And so was the Flicker.
And Cait was back. She opened her eyes and saw Kevin, sweet, considerate Kevin, his worried face staring down at her. She was stretched out on the hotel room floor, next to the bed where she had fallen when the Flicker started, lying flat on her back, legs splayed. Kevin crouched next to her, cradling her head in his arms.
She shuddered. Opened her mouth. Tried to speak. All that came out was a terrified husky squeak. She shook her head and realized she was panting, hyperventilating, and tried to slow her breathing but could not. She burst into tears and Kevin lifted her easily in his arms. He kicked the open suitcases to the floor, one after the other. Clothes burst out of them and formed small fluffy hills around the luggage. Then he set her down on the bed and held her as she cried.
After a while—Cait couldn’t say how long; maybe five minutes, maybe thirty—the terror began to abate, and the vision of what she had seen dimmed enough to allow her to concentrate on the here and now. Kevin stroked her hair rhythmically, caressing it, saying nothing, waiting for her, endlessly patient.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. She sobbed deeply and she thought she might scream but didn’t.
“Where were you?” Kevin asked.
“I don’t know. It looked like it might at one time have been an apartment. It was messy and dirty and in the middle of the room was a chair with a naked girl strapped to it. It was the girl from last night and she was being tortured horribly. I…I think I watched her die…”
Cait squeezed her eyes closed as if to ward off the vision, just as she had done during the Flicker, but she was no more successful now than she had been then.
“Oh God,” she said again.
27
The streets were relatively traffic-free—at least as traffic-free as they ever got in this metropolitan jungle—as Milo cruised toward Everett. Following his play time with the now-deceased Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker, he had wiped the bloodstains off his hands and arms as best he could using a series of dirty towels, then slept fitfully for a short while.
Following the invigorating nap, he clambered up off his air mattress and changed his clothes. Then he walked to the YMCA a few blocks away and showered with the hottest water he could stand, scrubbing the filthy stench of dead prostitute off his body.
Normally Milo could sleep like a baby for twelve to fourteen hours after one of his play sessions, but today was different. Today was special. Rae Ann had become nothing more than the first act, the warm-up band for the rock concert of torture that would soon follow. Milo was determined to introduce himself to the arrogant little bitch who had so recently begun haunting his visions.
His routine—and, in fact, his entire life—had been completely disrupted thanks to the mysterious young woman, and that made Milo nervous. Uncomfortable.
Usually, when entertaining one of his special guests, he was able to make the fun last much longer than it had with Rae Ann, although never as long as he wanted. He inevitably began a session with the best of intentions: to keep the girl alive for as long as possible. Not because he gave a damn about the girl, but rather because his surgical procedures only served to stimulate him while the victim was alive and conscious and thus able to appreciate what was happening to her. Once she was dead or even just passed out, the entire affair was instantly rendered pointless.
So his goal was always to do enough to provide for his own stimulation while not going so far that his guest slipped into unconsciousness, either from pain or blood loss. Eventually, of course, it would always happen. It was inevitable. And often when it did occur, the girl wasn’t just unconscious but dead. Unfortunately, and despite Milo’s best efforts at controlling his urges, he had a habit of becoming so engrossed in his work he was unable to hold back. He would pass the point of no return and lose his victim to eternal darkness.
Today that moment arrived even faster than usual, for the very reason that today Milo did not want to make the fun last. Today he had other business to attend to. He was only playing with Rae Ann because…well…because she was there, and it would be unacceptable to leave home without getting at least a small taste of such a succulent morsel.
So he had hurried things along. The session had still been immensely enjoyable, but varying his routine had taken him outside his comfort zone and had made him feel anxious and upset, like he was trying to keep a secret and was afraid someone else might have learned it.
And he had varied his routine in other ways too; ways that represented infinitely more risk to Milo than simply making him feel anxious. Typically, when finished with a girl, he would dispose of the body immediately, even before allowing himself to slip into the comforting cocoon of a good night’s sleep. Normally he played his games in the middle of the night, in part because it added a certain delicious ambiance to the proceedings, but also for the practical reason that it made corpse disposal much easier. He would simply hack off his victim’s arms and legs and stuff everything into garbage bags. Then he would take a midnight stroll, toting the bags to various restaurant Dumpsters around the city.
The only inherent risk was of being stopped by a patrolman while making his “deliveries,” but Milo had long ago discovered that law-enforcement presence in the neighborhoods he haunted was minimal in the
middle of the night. Even the cops who did patrol were not inclined to step outside the safety of their cruisers for anything short of a murder in progress. Milo had more than once been given the stink-eye by a passing cop, but he had never yet come close to being questioned while in possession of body parts.
Thus, the plan was nearly foolproof, if a bit labor-intensive. Restaurant Dumpsters always smelled of rotting food and the addition of one more piece of decomposing garbage would never even be noticed. Plus, they were emptied on a regular basis, meaning the evidence never lingered in the same location for long before being trucked away to wherever the hell restaurant trash went, probably an incinerator somewhere, which served Milo’s purposes perfectly.
That was how it was normally done.
Today, though, was a different story. He had played with Rae Ann in the middle of the day, so utilizing his typical method of disposal would be impossible. Even Milo recognized the danger inherent in carrying a human torso around the city surrounded by throngs of humanity. He would never get away with it.
So he left her taped to the torture chair in his living room. The duct-tape bindings had become moot, of course. It wasn’t like she would be going anywhere now. But with other things on his mind, more important things, Milo didn’t want to waste even a few minutes fussing with a cadaver. He would handle the cleanup when he returned, taking advantage of the soothing cloak of three a.m. darkness to transport Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker to various suitable resting places.
Trash in life; trash in death. There was a certain symmetry there that Milo very much appreciated.
He understood full well he was taking a calculated risk. Leaving a dead body in his living space after hours of torture was hardly the best way to accomplish a long life span outside a jail cell.
It wasn’t very bright.
In fact, it was more than just “not very bright,” it was incredibly, unbelievably stupid and reckless, and those were two traits Milo Cain had gone to great lengths to avoid during his long and successful run as an amateur practitioner of torture. This foolishness was completely out of character for him.
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