John Lutz - Serial

He disappeared from her view for a moment and her strength and courage began to clear away some of her terror. She could do more than croak now. She could scream. She could scream loud!

She drew in her breath and tried, but merely whined.

She heard him laugh.

He was back, but she still had a chance to scream. She saw that he’d been to her closet and had one of her stilettoheeled red pumps. As she stretched her jaws wide to shriek, he jammed the shoe’s pointed toe deep into her mouth, pinching her lower lip against her teeth. The shoe’s dirty, gritty sole lay hard against her tongue, its toe touching the back of her throat. The sound she made was more like a gargle than a scream.

Still pushing the leather toe down her throat, he bent the rest of the shoe upward, so it was shaped as if it were on the rear foot of someone taking a gigantic stride. The shoe’s curved back rim dug into her forehead just above the bridge of her nose, while her nose was in the shoe itself. She could barely breathe, and the sole of the shoe was exerting leverage and forcing her lower jaw down so far it felt as if it might become unhinged.

Quickly he wound duct tape around the shoe and her head so that everything was firmly in place as one piece and the pressure forcing her mouth wide was constant.

He stood back with his arms folded and surveyed his work. The firmly taped shoe was immovable, its stiletto heel protruding from the center of her forehead like the horn of a unicorn. She could barely see beyond each side of the shoe.

He smiled as he thought that was what she’d look like if he applied more tape-a mummified unicorn.

But as it was, she closely enough resembled a goat.

He drew from his pocket a long silver chain with a silver letter S dangling from it. He held the chain before her so she could see it around the shoe, and then looped it over her taped head. It lay on her bare neck and chest like ice.

Then, seemingly ignoring her, he began to undress.

When he was nude, he used the knife to cut away her clothes. It took a while, and her clothes were ripped as much as cut cleanly. While this was occurring she closed her eyes and her mind and sent herself away. This wasn’t happening to her, simply because it couldn’t be. Somebody else. It was somebody else in this bed.

My bed!

Candice felt her bladder release. The warmth of her urine between her thighs and beneath her was strangely comforting.

But when he held the knife before her eyes, her horror made everything dark, darker, and she welcomed losing consciousness. She wanted nothing more in this world than to slip into nothingness.

Almost instantly she was choking, gagging. The stench of ammonia made her nauseated.

She saw the small bottle in his hand, with the tight cotton wad stuffed in its neck, and knew immediately what he’d done. She could imagine him holding the bottle beneath her nose, near the deformed shoe.

He brought me back! Damn him! He brought me back!

“I don’t want you to miss anything,” he said, reading her mind. He gave her a smile that was eerily beatific. “Aren’t you sorry now for what you did?”

Keeping the ammonia at the ready on the nightstand, he began to work with the knife.

He was quick, deft, engrossed.

Even as the pain roared through her blood she recalled a case where a woman’s throat had been slit but not deeply enough to kill her. The victim’s blood had coagulated faster and thicker than usual and she’d survived.

It could happen.

That was the one slender hope she clung to as she slipped into, and was yanked back from, unconsciousness. Again and again. Journeys in and out of pain.

And again.

Very calmly, he drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. Like a character in an old movie, he let the cigarette dangle from where it was stuck on his lower lip, so that it waggled when he talked. The scent of burning tobacco mingled with the smell of ammonia.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she heard him say. “We both want the same thing now. For you to stay alive as long as possible.”

She moaned.

He giggled. “Well, I didn’t mean funny ha-ha.”

He held up the bloody knife so she could see it grasped in his rubber-gloved hand.

“Aren’t you sorry now for what you did?”

But she observed the dreaded knife only briefly.

During those times when she was conscious, she could not look away from his eyes.

Quinn and Pearl stood among the Crime Scene Unit techs, medical examiner, and police photographer, looking down at the dead body of Candice Culligan. In the corner of his vision Quinn saw Pearl absently cross herself. She was given to spells of Catholicism.

Dr. Julius Nift, the ME, was still bending over the bed on which Candice lay. He was feeling and probing, his jaw set, his eyes intent. Repugnant though the little ME might be, Quinn had no doubts about Nift’s competence.

“Last night around midnight, give or take two hours,” Nift said, in answer to Quinn’s question about time of death. “That’s all I can give you right now. It looks as if he started in on her hours before she died.”

“Stringing it out,” Pearl said through clenched teeth.

“Exacting torture,” Nift said, “with periods of rage. The way she’s so tightly taped indicates that. And look at the careful and precise stripping away of the top layer of skin so it dangles in shreds. Almost as if he were decorating her.”

Quinn forced himself to look again at what was left of Candice Culligan.

“Observe how those small cut marks and cigarette burns were done with such deliberation,” Nift continued. “Now look at her pubic area, the way it was slashed. Those long, curved cuts. This was a crime of passion. Sometimes cold passion, but passion nonetheless.”

“What about the shoe used as a gag?” Quinn asked.

Nift shrugged. “You tell me.”

“The way it’s taped to her face, so the spiked heel looks like it’s coming out of her forehead, makes it look almost like a unicorn horn.”

“So why would he give up on the wadded panties used as a gag?” Nift asked.

“He’s not satisfied with just pain,” Pearl said. “He wants to humiliate his victims. He’s getting more violent, more dangerous, if that’s possible.”

“Why all the dried blood around her mouth?” Quinn asked Nift.

“Shoe toe mighta been jammed in there so hard it took some teeth out. I’ll know more when I get her on the table and we get intimately acquainted.”

Pearl felt her stomach turn. It was all she could do to hold herself in check and not physically attack Nift.

“The name on the mirror this time is Nathan Devliner,” Fedderman said, walking back into the spacious bedroom. He’d been in another part of the apartment, checking for bloody writing. “I guess we have to check the Socrates’s Cavern membership again.”

Quinn said. “We still have the chain with the letter S.”

“We were speculating about the shoe jammed in her mouth, and bent and taped over her face so it looks like she’s grown a horn,” Pearl said.

“Unicorn horn,” Fedderman said.

Pearl glanced at Quinn.

“Great minds in the same channel,” he said. But the stiletto heel did resemble a unicorn horn.

“Maybe a reference to a goat,” Fedderman said. “A unicorn is a kind of goat.”

“Sacrificial goats,” Pearl said. She looked at Quinn and Fedderman. “Who knows what goes on in the minds of these sickos?”

“Isn’t it sacrificial lambs?” Fedderman said.

“Lambs don’t have horns,” Pearl said.