Dead and Gone

by Tina Glasneck

  And she wouldn’t get another chance.

  And the best part of all—the delicious cherry on top of this exciting dessert—was that her desperate efforts to assist the man were clearly going to be futile. The boyfriend was still breathing but it was obvious to Milo, who had plenty of experience in this particular arena, that the guy was well on his way to checking out. His skin was bedsheet-white and his lips were turning blue and his breathing was shallow and ragged.

  Milo nodded to himself, impressed with his handiwork. All that damage from one knife wound! Granted it was accidental, the result more of luck than skill, but the end result was all that mattered, and this was something to be proud of in any event.

  Now that he had a moment to catch his breath, he thought back to what the cop had said at the front door, and how it might affect his plans. A call from a neighbor concerned about the resident at this address. A resident who happens to be a lady.

  Apparently the neighborhood wasn’t quite as deserted as he had originally thought. Someone had seen him enter the house and had alerted the police. And killing a cop, although every bit as satisfying as he had always dreamt it would be, had ensured that he would receive a visit by more of the fucking cockroaches before long.

  A lot more. And they would be angry.

  But Milo wasn’t concerned. He had three hostages with which to bargain. Well, two, once you eliminated the chair-smashing hero, who was clearly not long for this world. One, actually, now that he thought about it, because after he finished with the pretty young thing currently blubbering over the unmoving body of the chair-smashing hero, she wouldn’t be worth a damned thing as a bargaining chip. She was the reason he had come here in the first place and he had every intention of finishing what he started, law-enforcement cockroaches or no law-enforcement cockroaches.

  But one hostage was plenty, anyway, and if it turned out that the authorities weren’t in a bargaining mood, so be it. It wasn’t like he had never considered the possibility of taking a bullet to the head. People with his…unusual…interests were universally misunderstood, and Milo had always accepted the possibility he would one day go out in a blaze of glory. If that day happened to be today, he was ready. He wasn’t particularly enamored of the idea, didn’t consider himself suicidal, wasn’t looking forward to dying, but found that the idea of going out in a dramatic showdown didn’t bother him all that much, either.

  The woman crouching next to her boyfriend looked up at the sound of the cop’s head striking the floor. She had removed the injured man’s shirt and used it as a makeshift bandage, rolling it up and fastening it around the injury, then closing the gash by tying the sleeves together. It was clever, Milo had to admit, and seemed to have done a pretty good job of slowing the bleeding.

  It wasn’t going to make any difference.

  “Well, ladies, that was exciting, wasn’t it?” He turned his smile in the direction of the trussed-up old bitch in the wooden chair, but she had screwed her eyes shut. She sat rigid and unmoving, seemingly trying to disappear into thin air through sheer force of will. He shrugged. Oh well. It would have been nice to get a reaction, but she wasn’t the reason he was here, anyway.

  “Your boyfriend is one brave motherfucker,” he said to the younger one, whose eyes were fearful but also watchful and wary as she gazed up at him. “Stupid as all get-out, there’s no denying that, but he’s brave. Unfortunately for him, his pain will be emotional as well as physical when he sees what I have in store for you.”

  “He can’t see anything,” she spat back. “He’s unconscious, you stupid bastard.”

  Milo narrowed his eyes and glared at her. The hatred he had felt the moment he saw her in the first vision ratcheted up a little higher. He was used to commanding submission and fear, but while this one was clearly afraid, she didn’t seem to understand her place in this hierarchy. She would find out soon enough.

  He held her stare for a moment, then turned and stalked into the kitchen. He grabbed another chair to replace the one the unconscious hero wannabe had broken over his back, and returned to the living room where he set it down next to the old biddie. Then he nodded at the man on the floor. “Put him in this,” he said.

  “He’s too big, I can’t move him.”

  “Shut up and do it,” Milo said, taking one step forward, reaching for his knife.

  The pretty bitch had stopped crying, but her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, and now they widened with his approach. “I’m afraid if I move him the wound will start bleeding again. I don’t think he can afford to lose much more blood,” she said, her voice a raspy whisper.

  “Well, he should have thought about that before he attacked me with a fucking chair!” Milo was trying to control his temper, but the very sight of this little bitch pissed him off to no end, and her backtalking and sassy attitude were making it immeasurably harder to do. “So I don’t give a fuck about his little razor-nick. If it bleeds, it bleeds. Now drag his ass over here and dump him in the chair.”

  “No.”

  Before he even realized what he was doing, Milo had taken three long steps across the room. He yanked the knife out from behind his back and knelt down next to the dim bitch. She leaned away from him but otherwise held her ground. Milo waved the knife in front of her face, then placed it against the unconscious man’s throat and smiled at her.

  “Your choice,” he said, speaking slowly. “Put him in that goddamn chair or I’ll finish him off right here and now.”

  “Oh, God,” she whispered, and got to her feet, then leaned down and hooked her arms under her boyfriend’s armpits, much as Milo had done with the dead cop a few minutes ago. With a grunt she began dragging the slack body of the much-larger man across the room.

  Milo nodded his approval. “Good choice,” he said, and observed the blood, indeed, begin once again to bubble through the already-soaked shirt. The process of the young woman pulling the body to the chair was resulting in a gush of blood every time she yanked. It was like watching an EMT doing chest compressions on a patient with a hole in his chest. It was almost dreamily hypnotic. Pull, bubble, rest. Pull, bubble, rest.

  Finally the chick reached the empty chair. Milo looked at the older one again and now her eyes were open wide. She stared in horror at the scene being played out just inches away. Milo felt a surge of savage excitement and almost laughed out loud.

  The younger woman leaned her boyfriend onto the chair. His bloody chest was laid across the seat and his head flopped down on his arms. The girl was breathing heavily, almost panting from the energy she had expended moving him. He probably weighed close to two hundred thirty pounds and she was a tiny thing, probably no more than one-ten, so obviously it had taken all of her strength to drag him across the room.

  “I can’t get him up there by myself,” she said, looking at Milo pleadingly. “Just let me lie him on the floor on his back to minimize the bleeding and I’ll do whatever you say, I promise.”

  “Let me get this straight. You’ll do whatever I tell you to do, as long as I don’t make you put him in the chair?”

  “That’s right. I promise,” she whispered.

  “Well,” Milo replied. “That’s quite the generous offer. Let me see…” He crossed his arms and cupped his chin in his hand, pretending to be deep in thought. He knew he should be hurrying things along thanks to the complications that were bound to arise from the dead cop lying on the floor, but this was just too much fun to pass up.

  “Uhhh…no,” he said after a satisfying pause.

  “Please.”

  “Here’s the problem,” Milo answered. “In order to bargain, you need leverage, and you have none. You say you’ll do whatever I want if I only let your dying boyfriend stay on the floor, prolonging his suffering, but the fact of the matter, missy, is that you’re going to do whatever I want, anyway. I have all the leverage.

  “So drag his ass into that chair and tape him in. He’s probably not going to regain consciousness and that’s a damned shame, but just
on the off chance he does suddenly pop his eyes open, I want to be sure he has a prime view of the display of performance art to come.

  “However. Just to show you I’m not unreasonable, I’ll help you. Hold this,” he said, flipping the knife into the air and catching it by the blade in the fingers of his bare hand. It was an impressive trick, one he had mastered years ago. He offered it, handle-first, to the young woman.

  Her eyes grew wide and she froze, confused, then reached hesitantly for it. At the last moment, Milo yanked it away like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. He had always thought that comic-strip gag was stupid, that there was no way in real life Charlie Brown would actually fall for it, but apparently the guy drawing the cartoon had known a little bit about human nature.

  The dumb bitch moaned and Milo laughed companionably. This was too much fun. “I guess I’ll just hold on to this for now,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  She looked away and didn’t answer.

  “Now, let’s get on with it. I’m afraid our time will be cut short thanks to this guy.” Milo nodded toward the body of the dead cop. “Once he fails to check in at headquarters on his hourly donut run, they may send someone to look for him.”

  He grabbed the unconscious hero wannabe by the shoulder with both hands, holding the knife handle nimbly in the fingers of his right. Then he flipped the man over so that his back was leaning against the chair seat. A great swell of blood bubbled out of his chest and the young woman gasped and quickly reached for him as well. Together they lifted him—she wasn’t kidding, he really was quite solid—head lolling, into the chair.

  The girlfriend held him steady while Milo reached for the duct tape, expertly rolling it around his ankles and wrists, taping them to the chair. He added a couple of long swaths, securing the man’s waist to the chair-back and the tops of his legs to the seat for support. His head still rested on his right shoulder, but Milo supposed there was nothing he could do about that. This would have to suffice. The odds against the hero wannabe ever regaining consciousness were astronomically long anyway, especially after his eventful trip across the floor. Besides, the clock really was ticking.

  He clapped his hands together and smiled at his two other companions.

  The conscious ones.

  “What do you say we get started?”

  42

  Holland Montvale had been a homicide investigator for longer than he cared to remember, and over the course of his career had seen the bodies of hundreds of murder victims, all suffering various desecrations and all in varying stages of decomposition. One thing they all had in common—maybe the only thing—was the ugliness of the crime’s aftermath.

  Gruesome injuries, tissue breakdown, a stricken look etched on the victim’s face, the stench of bowels and bladder being voided, all served to make the act of leaving the world via violence even messier than entering it had been. Learning to compartmentalize the reaction to that messiness was essential for any homicide dick and Holland Montvale had long since become accustomed to doing so.

  But Holland had to admit this scene was worse than most. The young woman had suffered, and terribly, from the wounds inflicted upon her small frame, and it was clear, even this early in the investigation, that death had come slowly. His gaze lingered over the ravaged body and he said a fervent prayer that when his time came, it would be over quickly.

  The CSI techs were busy doing their CSI tech stuff. Holland tried his best to stay out of the way until their work was done. He stood off to one side of the room, waiting patiently, watching the flurry of familiar activity with a professional detachment as he tried to put himself inside the killer’s head while the crime was taking place. It was awful to contemplate.

  A full complement of BPD officers had descended on the tenement building and fanned out in all directions, canvassing the area, searching out potential witnesses and, as unlikely as it seemed, hoping to get lucky and retrieve the murder weapon. Holland knew he would have to wait for the coroner’s report to be sure, but he felt confident the wounds had been caused by a common kitchen knife. What else would someone use to strip skin from bone?

  Assuming it was a knife, maybe it had been thrown or dropped by the killer in his haste to escape the scene.

  It seemed unlikely, but based on the condition of the victim’s body and the damage that had been done to her, Holland felt there was at least some chance the patrol officers might uncover something useful. He was no psychologist, but as a longtime homicide dick he felt he could reasonably make a few assumptions based on both the condition of the victim and of the apartment itself.

  The nature of the wounds on the body suggested that the suspect possessed, in addition to a terrifying level of psychosis, a meticulous personality and high intelligence, as evidenced by his preplanning skills. It couldn’t have been easy to set up the torture device and to lure the young victim here without being discovered.

  But the sloppiness of the execution—blood splattered everywhere, the corpse still strapped into the chair, the crime scene not even the subject of the most perfunctory cleanup—gave Holland pause.

  He had worked similar scenes before. If his theory was correct, the man—it was almost always a man when the crime was this vicious—was dissembling. He was being overtaken by his psychosis. He was becoming even more dangerous and unpredictable than he clearly already had been. The thought gave Holland a sinking feeling in his gut.

  He wandered around the tiny shell of abandoned apartment, concentrating mostly on the room where the young girl had been butchered. The living room. He thought about the irony of such a vicious murder occurring in the “living room” and a chuckle that sounded suspiciously like a choked-off sob escaped before he was able to stop it. He looked around to see if anyone had noticed and was relieved to see no one had.

  He considered the murder weapon. Or, more accurately, the absence of a murder weapon. What did it mean that the knife was gone? In most cases, it would simply mean the killer had maintained the presence of mind to take it with him when he left and had disposed of it elsewhere.

  But in this case, Holland wasn’t so sure. The perpetrator had not made any attempt to hide the mutilated body of his victim or in any way clean up his mess. Would it be consistent with the apparently mindless, frenzied nature of this attack to assume the man had regained enough logic and preplanning skill after committing this horrifying crime to take the murder weapon with him and get rid of it somewhere?

  Holland didn’t think so. He thought maybe it meant something else. Maybe it meant the killer wasn’t quite done yet. Maybe he planned on using the knife again.

  Holland had moved to the entryway between the living room and the kitchen in an attempt to stay out the way of the evidence techs, whose work he hoped would be finished soon. He shook his head slowly, thinking about Mr. Midnight running around the city, and when he did, his eyes fell on a piece of trash, no great surprise since the entire apartment was filled with trash.

  But this particular piece of trash appeared to have been placed, not scattered haphazardly like everything else, on a small, uncluttered portion of the scarred kitchen counter. Something about it bothered Holland. He bent down and examined it without touching it. It looked like the back of a cardboard insert to a snack cake package. Written on it in messy, spidery script, was “7 Granite Circle.”

  Holland felt his pulse quicken. It was a long shot, but maybe this “7 Granite Circle” was where the killer had gone. Maybe he had tortured this information out of his victim and was even now either at this address or on his way there. That the person who had planned and executed a crime of this magnitude would leave a handwritten note leading investigators to his current whereabouts seemed unlikely in the extreme, but if Holland’s theory about the killer dissembling was correct, it was at least a possibility.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. Holland Montvale had no idea how many towns and cities in the surrounding area had an address of 7
Granite Circle within their boundaries, but that information could be accessed easily enough. And it needed to be accessed right now.

  Before it was too late.

  43

  When the disgusting murdering psycho had offered his knife to her, flipping it into the air and then holding it out like a proud teen offering flowers to his date on prom night, Cait had known immediately he was screwing with her; she wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t nearly as clever as he thought he was. But she still could have grabbed for it. She had just been so concerned with Kevin and the awful blood bubbling out of his chest that she was just a little too slow on the uptake.

  If she had only whipped her hand up and grabbed it out of his slimy paw! She pictured herself plucking it cleanly from his palm and stabbing him in the heart, puncturing his chest like he had punctured Kevin’s, blood pouring out of the wound as he stared disbelievingly at the tiny woman he had so badly misjudged, at the knife handle sticking out of his own body, quivering to the pulsing beat of his dying heart.

  Cait considered herself a pacifist and not so long ago would never have imagined herself capable of the sort of black fantasy she was currently experiencing. But the world she had known her entire life, a world where people treated each other with dignity and respect and where things proceeded along a rational and understandable arc, that world was gone, at least for now.

  It was gone and it had been replaced by a world of madness and hate and unimaginable brutality and violence, a world where an armed police officer is no match for a madman with a knife.

  Cait was so wrapped up in the vision—not a Flicker, just a regular, garden-variety daydream—she didn’t realize the murdering bastard was talking to her until he leaned down into her face and shouted, “Hey!”

  She recoiled in surprise. “What?” she whispered.

  “I said it’s time to get this production rolling. Are you ready for Act One?”