Wrath White - Succulent Prey

"Oh my God! I-I'm sorry. I didn't know. No wonder you're so obsessed with finding out what makes them tick."

"Wil you help me?"

"Of course."

It took no time at al to locate their kil er.

"He's not in Seattle anymore. He's in Tacoma, at the state mental hospital in a special unit they have for violent sex offenders."

Joe scrol ed down the screen, reading about the hospital where Damon Trent had been kept since he'd openly confessed to drinking the blood of young boys and was declared unfit to stand trial a dozen years ago. Trent believed that he could absorb the souls of his victims by imbibing their body fluids. The article, written two years after his incarceration, said that Trent claimed the doctors at the state hospital were deliberately trying to drive him insane by depriving him of human blood to drink.

Joe wrote down the address and phone number of the hospital and turned his attention back to the thick meaty librarian. He'd wanted her for a long time and though he had needed to locate

Trent, he'd real y come down here for her, using his search for the child rapist as a way to get close to her.

"Would you have a cup of coffee with me?"

"I don't know. I've got a lot of work to do. Besides, I'm old enough to be your mother. Why are you so interested in me?"

"Because you're beautiful and I need a friend right now.,,

It was the right thing to say. Joe had been rehearsing it from the first day he'd seen her. Her need was so obvious you didn't have to be a con man or a predator to spot it. Emma needed to be needed. There was a deep loneliness and sorrow within her, like one of those chimpanzee mothers who cradle their miscarriages in their arms for weeks, refusing to accept their death. Joe played on those maternal instincts lying dormant within her, starving for a purpose.

"I know I frighten you. We can take separate cars and go to the cafe down the street where there wil be lots of people."

"That sounds awful. I'm sorry. It's not that I think you'd hurt me. It's just that… those books you read…"

"I'm a psychology student and I'm trying to understand what turns normal human beings into these vicious predators. One day, I hope I can find a cure for their madness."

"I think that's admirable, but I hope you won't be offended if I take my own car and meet you there?"

Joe smiled wide.

"Thank you."

They talked late into the night. Emma told him about her two failed marriages. Her first husband beat her and her second left her for her sister. She had a daughter who ran away from home five years ago, only two months after her sixteenth birthday.

"Do you ever hear from her?"

"She cal s every once in a while. When she's in trouble or needs money or just needs someone to listen to her. I'm a good listener. I don't know where she is now, though. She hasn't cal ed in months."

"It must be hard, not hearing from your daughter in so long."

"I cope."

Joe nodded and looked down at the scrap of paper with the name Damon

Trent written on it, fol owed by the phone number and address to the State

Hospital for the Criminal y Insane. He rol ed the slip of paper over and over in his hands as dark shadows slithered through his mind.

"What did he do to you?"

"You don't want to know."

"Maybe not, but you need to tel it. I can see that you're hurting. It might help to talk."

Joe didn't want to talk to her anymore. He didn't want to get too close because he was stil planning on murdering her, but maybe talking about these horrors would be just the distraction he needed. Perhaps it would calm him down until he could get her alone.

"I was riding my bike when he attacked me. I turned the corner and he was just standing there, grinning at me. I tried to turn the bike around and run. I could tel that he was going to hurt me. Of course, I had no idea how bad. I thought he was going to beat me up and steal my bike or something. Then he grabbed me by the throat. He squeezed so hard that I couldn't even scream. I couldn't breathe. I felt like I was going to pass out. Then he threw me in the back of his pizza van." Joe took a deep breath and rubbed his bare arms to warm himself as chil s raced the length of his spine.

"It's okay. You don't have to continue if it bothers you."

"When we got back to his place, he undressed me. He started punching me.

Then he started stabbing me. He stabbed me dozens of times, raped and sodomized me. I remember him licking my wounds, lapping up the blood like a kitten licking milk. His eyes were al glassy and vacant. He kept me down in that basement for days, feeding on me.

Somewhere along the way I passed out.

Then he put me back in the van and dumped me back in the park. I was the lucky one. I was his first victim. He got much more violent with the next ones before they caught him. Those he kept.

They never got to see the sunlight again. They died down in his basement."

The librarian was crying when Joe looked up. Joe reached out and brushed a strand of hair from the librarian's face, cupping her cheek in his hand and leaning in to peer into her sad eyes. He wiped away her tears with his thumbs.

Something about her sorrow was reawakening the monster, turning him on. He could feel the drive roiling like a furnace, burning at the root of him, hard and insistent.

Joe thought about Alicia, stil chained up back at the apartment. He thought about her magnificent ass. The soft sumptuous mound of tender fat and al the things he wanted to do to it, to her. Al the things he would do if he didn't curb his appetite with something else. Something like this librarian.

"I want to kiss you."

The librarian jerked away, shocked by

Joe's forwardness. It was Joe's firm belief that when most women ran it was because they wanted to be chased. He seized her face in his hands again and pul ed her toward him. Greedily he sucked and bit at her lower lip as he kissed her aggressively. She never struggled or made any attempt to resist him. Rather, her body melted to his touch as if it had been locked stiff with tension released the moment their lips touched. She responded to his kiss with her own, the desperate hungry embrace of a woman starved for affection, in need of a man's love.

She was out of breath when Joe leaned back in his chair and picked up his coffee. He stared at her with those same rapacious eyes that had long intimidated her as he sipped the scalding brown liquid. Emma trembled with want.

Embarrassed, she reached for her own coffee, lifting it up and then placing it back on its coaster. She looked back into Joe's terrible, wantonly sexual eyes and felt another wal crumble. She closed her eyes and let out a long sigh.

"What do you want, Joseph? What do you want from me?"

The air between them became hot and thick with a palpable lust. Joe licked his lips. He was recal ing the taste of Alicia's nipples when he'd eaten them and imagining what it must be like to consume a woman's entire breast.

"I want to make love to you."

"You just want to fuck me," she sighed, looking down into her lap. Then she looked back up and her eyes were furious with lust. "But that's okay. I think I want to fuck you too."

She leaned forward and took his hand.

Together they rose from the table and walked out into the parking lot.

"You'l be gentle with me, won't you? I haven't been with anyone since my husband and I divorced five years ago.

You'l take it slow, won't you?"

They were almost to her car. She pul ed out her keys and opened the car door.

"Promise me you'l be gentle with me."

"No," Joe said.

His huge powerful hands clenched tight around her throat and jerked the librarian up onto her tiptoes. As he closed his fingers tight around her windpipe she kicked and scratched, dragging her manicured nails through the skin on his forearms and punching at his face. She raked his throat with her fingernails, breaking off the plastic tips in his flesh before she blacked out. Joe stuffed her into the car and drove her across town to the apartment building on Folsom Street.