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  “That’s quick work.”

  “Time’s the issue. When they verify these two victims are part of our stream, we can pull in more resources. It’s Santiago and Carmichael we need. We verify the first victim, we’re closer to ID’ing the killers. The first is going to be closer to home, closer to where they knew – and were known. The first is key.”

  She looked toward the board. “But Campbell may not have time for that.” As she rose, Banner started to get to his feet. “Sit. Eat. I want to update the board. It helps me think.”

  She got to work. “Why don’t you brief the others on the two stops we made?” she said to Banner.

  “The lieutenant’s running searches on missings who have homes or businesses in the city here, figuring maybe they got somebody we haven’t found, and are using their place for their killing room.”

  “Have to be private,” Roarke speculated. “Soundproofed. Even gagged, such matters made noise. And low security or they’d show on disc when bringing in a victim.”

  “We stopped at two, eliminated them. Regular civilians living there.”

  “Others to eliminate,” Eve said. “We’ll spread out tomorrow, bring in some uniforms. They’ve got a place, one they’re comfortable in. One they could take Kuper to. One where they’re working on Campbell right now.”

  “Downtown,” Roarke added.

  “Probability’s high. Peabody, put the sector on screen.”

  While they ate, while they worked, Jayla Campbell struggled to rise above the pain. Going under it was a kind of escape, but they always brought her back, gave more.

  She’d stopped trying to understand it. It simply was.

  How long she couldn’t tell, not any longer. Hours, days, weeks. There was only pain and fear, and the certainty there would be more.

  They’d had sex on the floor, against the wall, sometimes blessedly out of sight. Though she could hear them grunting or wailing, laughing.

  They liked when she tried to scream, when she cried and begged. So she tried not to, but sometimes she couldn’t stop. Just couldn’t stop.

  They looked so ordinary. Monsters shouldn’t look so ordinary, so much like ordinary people. The woman was pretty, in a hard, slutty sort of way, and the man – good-looking, sort of gangly and… stupid, she thought now.

  He went along with anything the woman said.

  Cut here, she’d say – and he would.

  They were eating now, and the smell of the Chinese takeaway made her want to gag. She hadn’t eaten since the party. Sometimes they dribbled water in her mouth, but they never gave her food. Sometimes the water was laced with salt, and they laughed and laughed when she choked.

  Monsters shouldn’t look like ordinary people.

  They’d taken her clothes, but she’d gotten over the worst of that. Neither of them touched her in a sexual way – as if she cared about that now. They saved the sex for each other.

  They were naked, too, as they ate, and sometimes they smeared sauce on each other and licked it off.

  That, too, made her want to gag. At least she could close her eyes or turn her head. When they were involved in each other, she barely existed for them.

  She wished she would stop existing for them.

  They talked eagerly, avidly.

  He said they were star-crossed lovers. The woman – Ella-Loo – loved when he quoted Shakespeare or talked about how they were lovers like Bonnie and Clyde.

  She didn’t know who Bonnie and Clyde were, but the woman did; and she’d laugh and strike poses that made the man – Darryl – moan or lick his lips.

  She listened to them when she could, to every word. If she lived – and she didn’t believe she would, but if – she would remember everything. She would tell the police everything. And she would hope with every cell in her pain-filled body, the police killed them in the bloodiest, most brutal, most horrible way possible.

  She wanted to kill them with her own hands.

  She wanted her mother. She wanted Kari. Sometimes when she floated away, she wanted Luke, and his shy smile.

  She wanted anything and anyone who wasn’t this. Anything that wasn’t strapped to a table under bright lights with something round and hard between her teeth, something where she couldn’t feel her own blood oozing out of her body, or the jagged pain of bones broken and rubbing viciously together if she moved even an inch to try to find comfort.

  There was no comfort.

  “It’s something different, and daring,” the woman was saying. “We don’t want to get bored, right, honey?”

  “Are you bored, Ella-Loo?”

  “Not with you, baby. Never! You’re my hero. But just think how exciting. If we did two, at one time. If we kept them going longer. Oh, it makes me wet just thinking of it.”

  “I like you wet.”

  He stuck his hand between the woman’s legs. Jayla closed her eyes.

  “I’d be wetter, hotter with two. You can pick this time. Oh, yes! Get down there, baby, and get to work.”

  She yelped, she laughed, she groaned. “Fuck me hard, baby, hard! Then let’s go get another one. Let’s get a man. Maybe we can make them fuck each other. Let’s make him rape her while we watch. Oh, oh, Darryl!”

  “Anything you want. Anything. I love you, Ella-Loo.”

  “Make me scream, Darryl. Make me scream. Then let’s go get another.”

  And she smiled, feral and fierce, turning her head to look at Jayla as Darryl drove and drove and drove into her until sweat dripped off his face.

  She smiled her monster smile as she came.

  In the office, Roarke listened as the room of cops worked theories, ran searches. He listened while Eve spoke to Morris on the ’link, while she consulted with Mira.

  His mind worked back to the first – the one they believed was the first.

  A businessman killed on the side of the road. No vehicles left behind. Battered – fought back – smashed skull.

  Nothing like the others, he thought. No torture, no sense of time taken. But he trusted his wife’s instincts.

  The first, perhaps an accident, or a matter of impulse. The spark, possible, for all that came after.

  “Someone towed it off.”

  Distracted, a little annoyed, Eve glanced around. “What?”

  “You’ve two options on your first – on this Jansen. They had a second vehicle, and drove off separately, or they left a vehicle behind.”

  “No vehicle was recovered or reported on scene.”

  “And you’ve never heard of auto theft I’m supposing. Driving off in two, it’s not impossible, of course, but then they’d have to dispose of one, and they’d not be together after the kill – when the blood would be high.”

  “Wait.” She held up her hand to ward off comments, narrowed her eyes. “When the blood would be high,” she repeated. “If this is the first, if this started the ball rolling for them, it would be that high after the kill. Driving off separately? Cooldown period. So, less likely. But no vehicle reported or recovered.”

  “Darling Eve,” he said, and had Banner glancing at her sideways, “it’s a very remote and rural area, yes?”

  “So?”

  “And I’ll wager more than a pint there’d be a towing service or two, and beyond that – a farming sort of area? Those with tow bars handy enough. And it’s: Look there, mate, at that car/truck/van on the side of the road. Out you get to have a look. It may be it’s broken down —”

  “Which would be a reason to boost another car, okay.”

  “Some mechanical problem, that may be. Or it’s been previously boosted, and time to switch out. But either way, an enterprising soul might tow it off, strip it down or alter the van and resell it. Surely even in that area, they’d have a chop shop handy enough, or someone who’d pay to have another vehicle on their land.”

  When she frowned, he smiled.

  “Speaking hypothetically, of course, one who once made a bit of a living boosting vehicles may have cruised along such back roa
ds and byways for just such an opportunity.”

  “Slapping a tow bar on it, hauling it off to another location.”

  “And making a tidy little profit through little effort,” Roarke concluded. “You might have your people down there put the arm on towing companies, farmers, mechanics and such.”

  He looked over at Banner. “Would you have such events in Arkansas, Will?”

  “Could be. There was a guy the next county over who ran a chop shop. They picked cars off the interstate mostly, but hit the back roads, too. I never thought of it. People know people, and you hear tell.”

  Eve already had her ’link out. “Carmichael.”

  “About to contact you, LT. Having some Arkansas barbecue, and have to echo Santiago. Yee-haw. The coroner —”

  “Wait on that. I want you to push this angle, and now. Towing company, mechanics, garages, maybe little farms or whatever the fuck. Ability to tow away a vehicle. Let’s theorize,” she began.

  When she’d finished, clicked off, she looked over at Roarke. “It’s a good angle. The locals should have been all over it. You’re handy.”

  “I do my best.”

  “Maybe it happened that way. I like the logic of it. Maybe they boosted whatever they dumped – or just dumped. Either way it could take us back to the prior step, the earlier location. It may give us names.”

  She looked at the board, at Jayla. “Coffee,” she said.

  “I’m all about that,” Banner agreed. “Dallas, I may know somebody who knows somebody around there. I’m a little pissed I didn’t think of it before.”

  “Spend any time boosting cars, Banner?”

  “I didn’t, but I can’t claim not to know some who did. I may be able to help your people down there.”

  “Then get on it. Peabody?”

  “Sir.”

  “Coffee. Lots. Now.”

  While they worked the new angle, Ella-Loo, in a micro skirt taken off an LC they’d killed and whose name she’d forgotten, struggled with a bulky armchair.

  She was freezing in the skirt, in fishnets, and a short, fake leather jacket – taken off yet another victim – but inside she was furnace hot.

  The guy came bustling along, ’link in hand, hood of his parka thrown up. “Yeah, yeah, I’m on my way. Jeez, it’s like the South Pole out here tonight. I’m nearly there. Fire it up!”

  “Hey, cutie?”

  She called out, shook back her hair, saw him turn his head, give her the eye.

  “Back to you,” he said into the ’link and stuffed it in his pocket. “What’s shaking, baby?”

  “Could you just give me a hand, for one little minute? I can’t lift this silly thing in here, and I need to get it in before my completely ex-boyfriend comes back.”

  “Sure, no prob. Bad breakup?”

  “So bad. He hit me!”

  “Ah, come on.” The guy hunkered down to lift the chair. “You’re better off. I can get this if you take that side and —”

  Darryl leaped in, weighted sap – Ella-Loo’s idea – whacking down on the back of his head.

  He made a sound like a balloon letting the air out, and crumpled.

  “Quick, baby, quick, before somebody comes!”

  It took a couple of hard hefts to get him and the old, reliable armchair in the back of the van. Ella-Loo scrambled in after, happily giving the groaning man another good whack before yanking the duct tape around his wrists.

  “Let’s go, baby! We got him good. I can’t wait! I’m already wet. I’m already hot.”

  “Save it for me,” Darryl called, zipping out to drive the short two blocks back home.

  13

  Jayla knew struggling only caused more pain, but she went into a frenzy of it when she heard them leave. She screamed against the gag until her throat felt burned and bloody, twisted her body, strained up with her arms with everything she had left in her.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Fresh wounds opened on her wrists, her ankles so the thick tape binding them rubbed raw and wet. Her fight cracked the NuSkin they’d slapped on some of her wounds, so they seeped again. She tasted her own tears and hysteria until, exhausted, she went still.

  Remember, she ordered herself. Remember everything in case, just in case she lived through this.

  They had her strapped on some sort of board, tied and taped down. Rope around her waist, her belly. Sometimes they choked her with another until she passed out.

  Plastic – she thought – under the makeshift table. She could hear it swish and crinkle under their feet when they hurt her.

  A window. She could just see a window, barred, and a big brown couch where they sometimes had sex. And a screen – they watched porn and game shows on it.

  An apartment. Maybe street-level, she thought because she could hear traffic when they went out or came in through the door.

  A white ceiling – dingy white, be specific, Jayla – dingy white ceiling with those round lights inside it.

  They never turned the lights off.

  They brought in takeaway food – never deliveries, at least not when she’d been conscious. A lot of beer and jug wine. And once, at least once, she’d smelled Zoner.

  She could describe them perfectly.

  All she had to do was get away, and she could describe them both perfectly right down to the matching tattoos.

  Little hearts with D and E inside, etched in blue and red over their own hearts.

  People would be looking for her, she could comfort herself with that. She had people who cared about her, and would be looking for her.

  But how would they find her?

  Why hadn’t she called a cab? Why hadn’t she used her head and called a cab when she’d walked out of that stupid party? Why had she gone in the first place? Why hadn’t she stayed home and watched vids with Kari?

  She began to weep again, struggled again. And slid into shivering sleep.

  The noise woke her. For a moment she was back in her college dorm with Kari, trying to sleep while a party went on in the next room. She tried to roll over – and the grinding pain brought her back.

  They had music on – shit-kicking country music with some woman yodeling about how she was gonna hunt down her man. They sang along, top of their lungs, while they set up some sort of folding table.

  The woman danced around it, rubbed her ass into the man’s crotch, danced away again on a giggle.

  Jayla could see the plastic on the floor now.

  And the body sprawled facedown on it.

  Her first reaction was a kind of crazed jubilation. She wouldn’t be alone. They’d have someone else, might forget to hurt her, even for a little while.

  Shame avalanched over the ugly joy, reminded her whatever they did to her, she was still human. She could still feel shame. And pity.

  Together they rolled the body over, began to undress the man – no, she saw and the pity heightened. A boy. Younger than she was. Twenty, maybe twenty, and pale as glass.

  He stirred a little, moaning. Darryl picked up the sap – they’d cracked at least one of her ribs with that weighted leather bag – and slapped the boy on the side of the head with it. Like you might slap a fly – absently, with a mild annoyance.

  “Don’t want him waking up as yet,” Darryl said. “Need to get him situated first.”

  “He’s about the whitest thing I’ve seen outside of that snow on the ground outside.” Ella-Loo snickered as she dragged off the boy’s pants.

  She dumped out the contents of the pockets while Darryl finished getting him stripped down. And opened the wallet.

  “Got less than twenty on him. Shit, and no wrist unit or nothing. Name’s Reed Aaron Mulligan.”

  Jayla repeated the name over and over in her head. She’d remember Reed Aaron Mulligan. About twenty, on the skinny side, milk-white skin and some freckles, reddish-blond hair with a sorry-looking goatee on his soft boy’s face.

  “Key swipe, few loose credits, nice little pocketknife. One of those – what-d
o-you-call-thems?”

  Darryl glanced over. “Multi-tool. Lemme see.” He took it from her, examined it. “It is a nice one,” he said and slipped it into his own pocket.

  “Boots’re pretty new, and the coat, too.”

  Christmas presents, Jayla imagined. From his parents. His parents would be looking for him soon.

  “Too small for you,” Ella-Loo said to Darryl, and standing, tried on the coat. “It’s warm.”

  “Not pretty enough for you, baby.”

  “I bet we can get something for it, and the boots.” She tossed them, and his pants toward the couch, then studied Reed Aaron Mulligan with her hands on her hips.

  “Pecker’s nothing to write home about, but we get some Erotica in him, get the wood going on him, he’ll do all right.”

  She turned to Jayla then, smiled that hot, feral smile. “He’s going to rape the shit out of you.”

  Jayla wanted to close her eyes, just close them and go away again, but she made herself meet those hard eyes. Made herself stare back into them until Ella-Loo picked up the sap, slapped her once, twice in the crotch.

  The pain burst in her center, radiated everywhere.

  “There’s a taste for you.” Angling her head, as if considering, she slapped each of Jayla’s breasts in turn.

  As Jayla’s body arched and fell, Ella-Loo watched the bruises bloom.

  “I never tried any sex stuff with any of them. It gets me hot.”

  “Me too.”

  She glanced over, saw the gleam in Darryl’s eyes, the way his hand was working between his legs.

  “Not yet, baby. Not yet. Let’s get our new friend here situated, like you said. We’re going to want to soften him up a little.”

  Jayla crawled into herself, into the tight, dark space where the pain pushed around the edges. After a while, she couldn’t say how long, she heard the awful, almost inhuman high-pitched sound, one she’d heard herself make.

  And knew they’d begun to soften up Reed Aaron Mulligan.

  Eve read over DeWinter’s very preliminary report, again.

  Too early to be conclusive – and that just burned her ass – but DeWinter believed, and Morris concurred – that a number of Melvin Little’s injuries had been inflicted prior to his fall. Some as much as twenty-four to thirty-six hours prior.