“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re to get your pretty little ass over to that couch and lie down on it.”
Oh, God.
This was worse than she thought. The idea of that horrible, nasty man raping her, sticking any part of his disgusting body inside her, was too much to bear.
As if he could read her mind, the man snickered. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” he said. “Although, if you don’t get moving, I might fuck you just to make a point.”
Cait knew she should shut her mouth and do what the man said, but she couldn’t help herself. “What point would that be?” she said, half wondering when the breakdown she was expecting any moment would strike and she would be reduced to a blubbering, sniveling idiot. So far it hadn’t happened, but how far off could it be? She felt her sanity warping, being stretched to its limits.
“The point,” he answered, baring his teeth, his hate for her radiating off him like a force field, “is that you think getting raped is the worst thing I could do to you, but you have no fucking idea how wrong you are. But if you don’t do as you’re instructed, and I mean right fucking now, I will rape you just for the fun of it and then we’ll take things from there.”
Cait began moving in a confused daze toward the couch. She wondered why he wanted her to lie down if he didn’t plan on raping her. She wondered what she had ever done to this man to warrant the kind of hatred he clearly felt for her.
She couldn’t recall having ever met him—and she was certain she would remember a man this evil if their paths ever had crossed—but everything he was saying seemed to indicate this was personal, that everything he was doing was about her, and her alone.
She wracked her brain, trying desperately to think, but her brain wouldn’t cooperate. It felt like mush. The panic that threatened to overwhelm her made concentrating difficult. She knew this was her long-lost brother, the twin she had not even been aware existed until yesterday; that much she had already deduced, even without the benefit of a Flicker.
Could it be he was aware of their relationship? If so, could his barely controlled rage be somehow related to that knowledge? And more importantly, could she figure out a way to use that knowledge to her advantage? Dammit, think!
She reached the couch and turned to sit on the dingy material but Milo stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “No,” he said. “We can’t very well put on this performance with you still in your street clothes, can we?”
The panic threatened to mushroom again. What the hell did he mean by that? The situation was bad enough without this madman speaking in riddles.
“I don’t understand,” she said, a lump forming in her throat, tears on the verge of returning.
Cait longed to be wrapped in Kevin’s arms, his muscular body pressed to hers. It was an almost visceral need. She glanced at him, still unconscious, duct-taped to the chair, and forced herself to focus. He was dying and he needed her, and falling to pieces from terror and confusion would do nothing to help him.
“So I need to change my clothes?” she asked, amazed at the steadiness of in her voice. She had no idea where that was coming from.
“Well, not change, exactly,” he said with a smile. It made him look like a shark about to strike.
“May I undress in the bathroom?”
The crazy bastard actually laughed at that one. “Oh, sure,” he said. “No problem. You go right ahead into the bathroom, where there are probably no more than a couple of dozen potential weapons you could use against me! Scissors, tweezers, nail files, maybe a toothbrush to jab into my eye. How fucking stupid do you think I am?”
Cait dropped her head. Her eyes swept the floor, taking in the damage from the smashed chair. She sighed. She knew where this was going. She raised her head resolutely and began unbuttoning her blouse. She hesitated only a moment before shrugging it off her shoulders and down her arms. She shook it onto the floor where it fell, inside out, atop a jagged splinter of broken chair. Then she unsnapped her jeans.
Another moment’s hesitation and then she pushed them over her hips and down her legs, stepping out of them, and then they joined her blouse on the floor and Cait Connelly was standing in front of her assailant—her brother!—in just her matching black panties and bra and socks.
She reached behind her back to unhook her bra and to her surprise, Milo shook his head. “That’s enough,” he said, his voice husky, “at least for now.”
Cait let her hands drop to her sides and the two of them faced each other and Cait waited for the next awful instruction from this awful man and suddenly she felt it again—that little push she had first noticed when she was kneeling over Kevin’s body trying to stanch the bleeding while the lunatic with the knife was preoccupied with carving up the police officer.
The little push was familiar. It was the sensation of an image being forced into her brain without any effort on her part to accomplish it. Cait had tried to describe the sensation to Kevin once and had likened it to an inflation needle being inserted into a basketball—the air that was already inside the ball stayed there, but once the needle forced its way inside, more air could be pushed into the ball.
There was one very significant difference, though. She had never been able to stop a Flicker. Once that little push started, the Flicker was coming and there was not a damned thing she could do about it. But when she had experienced what she believed to be the onset of a Flicker a few minutes ago—twice—while occupied with trying to stop Kevin’s bleeding, she had managed to successfully block it out.
At the time she had not given it too much thought; things were happening fast and she was in a panic and there were other, more critical issues to consider. Now, though, as she felt the relentless push in her brain, she wondered if she could do it again. It was absolutely imperative that she keep her wits about her. The last thing she wanted was to disappear insider her mind under the influence of a Flicker and allow this maniac even more control over her than he already enjoyed.
Kevin needed her, he was dying because he had tried to protect her, and she represented his only chance at survival. She willed herself to ward off the Flicker, concentrating with everything she had, rejecting the push. The lunatic with the knife—her brother—was talking to her, he was saying something, she could hear him and knew she should answer him, but her concentration was focused entirely on rejecting the Flicker and so for the second time in just a few minutes she risked everything by ignoring him.
And it worked.
After a few seconds the push eased off, started pulling away, made a last-ditch final effort to invade her mind and then was gone. Cait felt a trickle of sweat roll down her cheek and brushed it away with her hand. She was exhausted but thankful she had been able to repel the ill-timed Flicker.
She glanced at Kevin—he was still unconscious and seemed to have gotten even paler—and noticed her mother staring at her with a look of intense concentration, she seemed almost to be pleading with her expressive eyes.
Then she shrugged her shoulders and returned her attention to the crazy man named Milo. She waited to see what was coming next.
44
Everett Police Captain Lynn Talmadge punched the flashing yellow button on the ancient console phone taking up an almost comically large portion of her desk. An audible clunk told her she was now connected with the outside caller, Lieutenant Bruce Miller of the Boston Police Department. Miller had insisted to the dispatcher that he be connected immediately with the watch commander at the Everett station, that he had critical information to pass along regarding potentially a life-and-death situation.
“This is Talmadge. How can I help you, Lieutenant?”
“Hello, Captain. Thanks for taking my call.”
“Well, you made it sound pretty important. What’s going on?”
“We’re investigating a homicide here, a very bad one. Another ‘Mr. Midnight’ killing. The victim has been dead just a few hours. It’s a young woman, probably a prosti
tute. She was stabbed, slashed, had her fingers broken and…”
Miller hesitated on the other end of the line and Talmadge prompted him. “Yes?”
The lieutenant took a deep breath and it sounded like he was working to keep a tremble out of his voice, but that seemed absurdly unlikely. The Boston Police Department investigated murders routinely. Bruce Miller had probably seen hundreds of victims during his career and had undoubtedly become detached and clinical when investigating murders years ago.
Finally he continued, his voice subdued: “…and she had entire sections of skin stripped off her body. She was literally peeled like an apple. Someone’s into some seriously weird shit with a knife.”
“Oh, God,” Talmadge muttered, not saying what she was thinking—that she was glad the nutcase had chosen Boston to go off in rather than Everett.
“You and me both,” Miller agreed, a little more vigor returning to his voice. “But there’s more.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“You should be. The suspect’s in the wind and our lead homicide investigator uncovered evidence that may indicate he isn’t finished yet.”
“And?”
“And he’s possibly headed in your direction.”
Talmadge sighed and closed her eyes. “What sort of evidence?”
“It’s a hastily written note that looks as though it may have been jotted down by our killer. It was found next to the body.”
“And what does the note say?” Talmadge asked, a trace of frustration creeping into her voice. This Miller character couldn’t just come out with it, he had to string her along, make her ask a million questions. Officious prick.
“It doesn’t really say anything. There’s just an address jotted down on the back of a piece of scrap paper—Seven Granite Circle.”
“Ooookay…” Talmadge hesitated. Why did that street name sound familiar? She shrugged and continued, “I guess the obvious question would be, why did ‘Seven Granite Circle’ make you think of Everett and not somewhere else?”
“Because there are only two communities in the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts containing Granite streets, and—”
“—and one of them is Everett,” Talmadge finished. She felt her stomach tighten as she suddenly remembered why the Granite Circle address rang a bell. One of her officers had been dispatched to that address a short while ago. A report from a neighbor concerned about a possible break-in.
At 7 Granite Circle.
Suddenly it became very important to get Lieutenant Miller off the phone and talk to dispatch. Her officer had walked straight into a nightmare.
45
Milo frowned in frustration. What the hell was it with this bitch? She should have been nearly out of her mind with fear, crying and blubbering and begging for her life. He had had extensive experience torturing pretty young women—there weren’t many things in this life he was good at, but torture was definitely one of them—and the cycle of emotions undergone by his playthings was virtually always the same.
First would come surprise. More like shock, really, as the realization struck them that this man was not the harmless person they thought he was. Surprise would be followed immediately by fear. It wasn’t quite terror; that would come later. Rather, it was more of a realization that things were spinning out of control and they knew everything was going wrong but did not yet realize just how wrong.
After that would come resistance and a stubborn belief that if they worked hard enough at convincing him to let them go, he might change his plans and target a different girl. This was always the most entertaining part of the whole experience for Milo until the actual torture started. Some of the girls would beg and plead, others would act tough, putting up a brave front, displaying a belligerence they could not possibly feel. Some would sweet-talk him, coming on to him like a lover, as if maybe he was too stupid to see through the obvious ruse. He hated that, being treated like an idiot by a common streetwalker.
Eventually, though, the girls always reached the breaking point. Often it was not until he started in on them with his knives and his pliers, but it always happened. They would break down and begin screaming (hence the all-important duct-tape gag) and babbling incoherently, unable due to fear and pain to manage a coherent sentence or even an intelligible word.
The cycle was as regular as the tides in Boston Harbor. But this girl was different, which of course made him hate her even more but also—if he was being honest with himself, which he always tried to be—fear her just a little bit. It wasn’t a fear that she might overpower him and somehow escape. That was a complete impossibility, so unlikely as to be laughable.
Rather, it was a twinge of concern, a vague notion that he might be unable to gauge her reactions properly and thus be ineffective in controlling her. With everything that had happened over the last few minutes, this clean-cut, innocent All-American beauty should have been well on her way to her inevitable nervous breakdown. And yet there she stood, clad only in bra and panties, clearly uncomfortable about her near-nakedness but standing ramrod-straight and looking him in the eye, determined not to let him get the upper hand.
It was a ridiculous notion, of course. He already had the upper hand and was not about to relinquish it. But it did throw him off his game for just a moment. He reached behind his back, stroked the knife handle, comforted by its presence, excited he would be getting an opportunity to use it, and very soon now.
He said, “Lie down on the couch,” and she stood there, gazing into the distance, as if just now realizing she had left the iron on or forgotten to put in the roast beef for dinner. Jesus, this bitch was annoying!
“I said, get your pretty little ass onto the couch.” He raised his voice for emphasis and the woman came back from wherever she had gone, blinking hard and looking at him in surprise, almost like she had forgotten he was there. Again, annoying as hell.
A tiny flicker of fear passed across her eyes and then she seemed to regain her composure and it disappeared. Not for long, Milo thought. Pretty soon it will be back for good. She eased into a sitting position on the threadbare couch, crossing her legs and folding her arms across her chest. She looked good, had a great figure, well-toned abs, smallish tits but very proportional, and long, lean, athletic legs. For a moment Milo wished he was like most men. He could have had a field day with this girl.
But he wasn’t like most men. An attractive female form did nothing for him unless he was working it over with a knife or pliers, stabbing and slashing and ripping. Then, and only then, would he find himself getting hard. Then, and only then, would he be able to achieve sexual release.
Of course, he had no intention of letting this girl in on that little secret. It had been his experience that the longer a playmate thought she was managing to avoid being raped, the easier she was to control and the longer she would remain compliant.
He eyed her, seated demurely like a virgin on prom night. “That’s a good start,” he sneered. “Now, lie across the couch on your back.”
The fear returned to her eyes, this time not just flickering across them but thundering into them like a runaway freight train. Milo felt a twinge in his groin as his body reacted to this demonstration of the power he held over his victim.
The girl hesitated, just as she had done when instructed to strip, but after a moment she seemed to acknowledge the helplessness of her situation. She lifted her feet, knees still locked together, and swung them onto the plush cushions. Then she slid her upper body down along the couch-back, never taking her eyes off Milo’s, until finally arriving at the position he had intended, fully horizontal with her head propped up on the armrest.
A smile spread across his face and he pulled the long knife out of its makeshift scabbard at his back. He studied his victim like an artist pondering a blank canvas. An electric tension hung in the air. Milo could not see the older broad—she was behind him, still trussed up on her chair next to the unconscious hero who had tried to save the day—but nevertheless he
knew she was trying to avert her eyes and failing. She didn’t want to watch but she had to, which added a nice little charge to the excitement he was already feeling.
At last he stepped forward, knife held firmly in his right hand.
And the girl said, “There’s something you should know.”
46
Cait thought she had done a pretty good job of keeping herself together until the crazy bastard told her to lie down on the couch. That was when she thought the tenuous grip she had managed to maintain over her emotions might come crashing apart, like water rushing out of a smashed drinking glass.
The thought of lying nearly naked, utterly exposed in front of this monster, was terrifying. It made no logical sense, of course. Realistically, she should have been just as frightened sitting on the couch with her legs crossed and her arms folded. None of that would provide her with the slightest protection if Milo decided to begin wielding his blade.
But then, nothing that had happened since leaving Tampa made sense anyway. A simple trip up the East Coast to reunite with a long-lost parent had turned into a nightmare of the highest order. This whole experience was a tumble down the rabbit hole, a field trip to hell, an inexplicable descent into madness.
So in a matter of seconds, when the lunatic grinned his greasy, terrible grin and told her that sitting on the couch wasn’t good enough, that she would have to uncurl her limbs and stretch out on her back, her body almost completely unclothed, Cait Connelly fully and unforgettably discovered the meaning of the phrase, “the last straw.” A roaring that only she could hear filled her ears and puffy black clouds bloomed in her vision and she thought for one awful moment that she was suffering a stroke and that she would either pass out from the debilitating fear or just freeze up and turn into a gibbering, drooling mental case.
But again the thought of Kevin kept her going. His condition had not improved, he was still unconscious and taped to a chair, hanging on to life by a thread, blood slowly seeping out of him, still depending on her resourcefulness for whatever slim chance at survival he might have.
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