Michael Morley - Spider

For one moment Nancy's mind went into flashback. The heavy black camera looked strangely familiar. Why?

And then she remembered. It looked identical to the square, black object she'd seen the previous night. The object in the hand of the burglar in her bedroom.

FBI Field Office, New York Angelita Fernandez put down the desk phone and grimaced as she turned to Howie Baumguard. The big guy really looked as though he could do with a break. And this wasn't going to be it. 'I just talked to Gene Saunders out at Myrtle. Seems our man Stan is a no-show.'

'He ever done that before?' asked Howie, lost in some work on his computer.

'Nope. Doesn't seem that way. His boss at UMail2 Anywhere says he's a good kid. Always bang on time. Never swings a day off without asking, or at least calling in with a reason rather than an excuse.'

'Sounds like Jack's right,' said Howie, typing with two fingers. 'Poor kid.'

Fernandez tried to picture what the delivery boy looked like and settled on young, thin and scrawny, still trying to make his way in life. 'You really think Stan got wasted before BRK did a runner from Myrtle?'

'It's sure starting to look that way,' said Howie.

Fernandez picked up a pencil and twirled it like a baton through the fingers of one hand. It was a trick she'd picked up in high school and somehow it helped her concentrate. 'I'll check on the bones downstairs. Dental should have some results now on Kearney. You think it's a match?'

'I'm banking on it,' said Howie. He'd asked for the dental check to make doubly sure that the skull they'd found was really Sarah Kearney's and not someone else's. He didn't want the embarrassment of finding out later that they had all been jerked around yet another time by BRK. He stopped typing and turned to Fernandez. 'You know much about necrophilia?'

'You're kidding, right?' she said, shooting him a disapproving stare. 'I've dated some deadbeats in my time, ex-husband top of the list, but not literally.'

'Necrophiles,' said Howie, paraphrasing an FBI entry on his screen, 'get their rocks off having sex with dead bodies.'

'Go away. I would never have guessed that. Now I see why you got the big stripes.'

'Shut up and listen, I might just need your help here.'

She twirled her pencil again and thought he was kind of cute when he pretended to be annoyed.

'The word is Greek in origin, comes from nekros meaning corpse and philia, which as we all know means love.'

'I kind of like those two words when they're not in the same sentence,' said Fernandez.

Howie shot her another shut-the-fuck-up glance. 'The psych notes say necrophiles have poor self-esteem, have a need for power over or revenge against something or someone that makes them feel inadequate, and have been deprived of certain key emotional contact.'

'Hang on though,' said Fernandez, getting serious for a moment. 'What little I know about these creeps, which again I stress is not through any personal dating, is that they don't usually kill. They like their meat cooked already. Ain't that right? As you so eloquently said yourself, they "get their rocks off" by messing around with dead bodies, not by making people dead for them to mess around with.'

'Subtle difference, but yeah, you got a point,' admitted Howie, searching the on-screen files for more info. 'But let's agree that having sex with a dead body isn't normal. Now, from that intellectual standpoint, it ain't too big a leap of faith to think that an abnormal guy, who likes stiffing it to a stiff, might just start making stiffs for himself if his regular stiff supply has run dry.'

'You got a natural gift with words, anyone ever tell you that?' said Fernandez sarcastically.

'I'm constantly fighting the urge to write poetry,' countered Howie, scrolling to a new page.

'Why does BRK qualify as a necrophile?' asked Fernandez.

Howie started to run through a list. 'He keeps the bodies after death. Look at how long he kept the Barbuggiani girl after he killed her. He takes trophies from them. He goes back to graves, digs up their corpses and hacks off their heads. Sounds like a necrophile to me.'

'So this guy could be a serial killer and a necrophile. A kind of hybrid?'

'That's what I'm thinking,' said Howie 'A double-trouble psycho. Maybe he started killing for a non-sexual reason.'

'Revenge, accident, opportunity?' suggested Fernandez.

'Something like that. Then when he was faced with a dead body, he suddenly got turned on by it.'

'You got any case studies in there that I can read up on?' she asked.

Howie hit a search function. 'Yeah, here you go. Man, there's one hell of a list coming up: Carl Tanzler, Richard Chase, Winston Moseley, our old pals Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy – those last three seem to be pretty much in every classification there is.'

'Lazy research,' said Fernandez, scribbling down their names. 'If everything that was written about Bundy was true, he'd have had to have lived three lifetimes.'

'This is interesting,' said Howie, ignoring her pet rant about Bundy. 'There's a bullet-point summary. It says necrophiles are usually fearful of rejection by women they sexually desire. Can you imagine what a necrophile would do in the kind of situation where he feels rejected?'

Fernandez was in step with his thoughts. 'You mean he'd kill her to keep her?'

'Exactly!'

Fernandez mused on it. 'Maybe BRK got badly jilted once, and he just couldn't bear the idea of anyone else walking out on him.'

'Once bitten twice shy,' said Howie.

'He couldn't face the idea of being on his own? Maybe he was just shit-scared of the whole thought of being lonely. A kind of lonelyphobia?'

'I think that's it,' said Howie. 'Death is the way he ensures that they never jilt him, that they stay with him, devoted to him, for ever.'

'Hmm,' said Fernandez. 'I'll remember that next time I give some Brad Pitt lookalike my number in a bar.'

Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York It has been more than fifty hours since any food or liquid has passed the parched and blistered lips of Ludmila Zagalsky.

As she slips in and out of delirium, her mind is constantly tormented by the knowledge that she is involved in a unique act of self-cannibalism. As well as the awful stinging in her eyes, a new agony has surfaced, a raw and wretched stabbing pain in her kidneys. Lu doesn't know enough anatomy to be able to even name the organ that's hurting, let alone diagnose that she's rapidly heading towards permanent renal damage. But she knows one thing for sure; something important inside her is screaming for water and without it she is going to die.

Once upon a time, back in the real world where people weren't kidnapped, stripped naked and tortured to death, she'd been eating pizza with an old boyfriend; they'd watched Scream, or was it Scream 2 or 3? Anyway, they'd jokingly discussed what would be the worst way to be killed – the bullet, the blade, drowning or maybe fire. Her friend had said he'd hate to be burned alive at the stake, like they used to do in France with chicks such as Joan of Arc. Lu had confessed she couldn't swim, had never been in the sea or a swimming pool in her life and was shit-scared of drowning. As they'd finished off the deep pan and thought about making out, neither of them had considered that probably the worst way to die was to be deliberately starved to death.

Right now, Lu reckons drowning might not be such a bad way to go after all. A girl she used to work a corner of the Beach with once told her that she should drink about half a gallon of water every day to stay healthy. Half a gallon a day! She'd nearly wet herself laughing. The kid had said she'd been balling some kind of health freak, a gym monster who had muscles like the Incredible Hulk, and he'd told her that more than eighty per cent of blood is made up of water so you've got to keep topping up the fluid level. It had sounded like bullshit. Until now. For the first time in her life, she understood every word of it.