James Patterson - Murder House

Be indignant. This is your house. She’s the intruder. Say that. Say that!

“I’m the... owner,” he manages. He raises a hand in peace.

The girl is too stunned for a moment, but Holden planned this out well. The words did the trick. She doesn’t turn and run, not immediately.

“Oh — oh. I — you’re the own—”

“Dede? Is everything okay?” It’s the other girl. “Dede?”

The blonde looks back toward the living room, then back at Holden.

“How... many of you are... here?” he asks. Excellent! Just what an indignant owner would say.

“Just two of — oh. Oh.” Her eyes dart downward just as Holden feels the warm stain spreading across his crotch. He just pissed himself. He looks down, and then back up at her.

“We’ll leave right now, mister. I’m really sorry.”

She spins on her heels to leave. Holden closes the distance between them in an instant. She senses his approach and starts to run and is nearly out the door when he reaches her, stabbing the Taser into the back of her neck. She goes down hard, her body suddenly limp and unable to break her fall, her face smacking against the kitchen wall and landing hard on the ceramic tile.

“Dede?” comes the voice from upstairs.

Holden drags the blond girl — Dede — into the kitchen, away from the view of the dining room, a trail of blood smearing in her wake. Is she... dead? The fall was nasty. She’s bleeding from the nose and forehead.

What has he done? What’s he going to do? He’s thinking fast, but the adrenaline is catching up with him now and he can’t let it paralyze him, he’s got to think-think-think—

Hearing the urgent footfalls in the living room, Holden grabs a frying pan from the overhead rack and raises it above his head. The brunette gasps before she’s even entered — seeing the bloodstain first, no doubt — and when she rushes in, her eyes are already cast downward at her lover. She lets out a horrific scream as she looks up to meet Holden’s eyes, but by then the frying pan is already crashing down on the crown of her skull.

The pan almost bounces out of Holden’s hand from the harsh impact. He’s never hit anything so hard. The brunette is stunned, reaching for support but unable to find any. She sinks to her knees, still upright but precariously so, and before she falls like a tower tumbling over, Holden raises the pan and cracks it against her skull a second time. When she crumples to the floor, she is lifeless, like a balloon figurine that the air has been let out of. Her eyes are open but still.

Is she dead?

Holden bounces on his toes, looking at each of them. The blonde is still breathing. The brunette is not.

“It was a... accident,” he says. “I didn’t... I just wanted...”

What does he do now? Panic sweeps over him. Run, he thinks, but No, too many clues left behind. The blonde knows what he looks like.

She moans. Her shoulders move. She’s trying to turn over.

Holden watches her. Watches her struggle. Watches her suffer.

But this is their fault. They shouldn’t have surprised him. They made him do this.

“No... no...” The blonde is making noise on the floor. He taps her with his foot. She groans in response. He bends down and rolls her over on her back. Turns her bloodied face to the left, so she can see her girlfriend.

“Look at her,” he says. “Look.”

Her eyes widen in horror. She manages a low, guttural, garbled wail.

It’s the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard.

Holden puts a hand on his stomach. It causes a physical pain, a rumble in his stomach like hunger for food, a growl that resembles the angry hum of the motorcycle on which he’s riding at the moment.

He needs it again. He needs the thrill of the chase, the anticipation, the climax itself. It’s been over a year since Dede and Annie, and he can’t decide what was most invigorating: the initial approach, sneaking into the mansion; the physical act; the pain and suffering...

...so much to choose from. It’s kind of like deciding what you like best about pizza, the cheese or the sauce or the toppings; they are inseparable ingredients of a delicious experience. But if he had to choose, it was none of those things. No, it was the aftermath, what’s happened every day since, the feeling of invincibility that comes with knowing he got away with it, that he can do whatever he pleases and nobody can catch him, nobody can stop him.

Oh, there was an investigation. Apparently the girls, Dede Paris and Annie Church, hadn’t told anyone where they were spending the summer. They had told their friends one lie, their parents another, but nobody the truth. It was only through cell phone records that authorities were able to place them in the Hamptons at all. But it was over two weeks after he’d killed them that a search even began, and it wasn’t much of a search. Nobody had any idea where the girls were staying in the Hamptons. They never even focused on Bridgehampton, much less the house at 7 Ocean Drive. The best guess was that the girls were staying in Montauk, because that was where they found Annie’s car, in a tow yard after it had been parked illegally in a church parking lot, stripped of its license plates. (Yes, Holden has congratulated himself for moving her car.) It was when the authorities found the car that they officially determined... drumroll, please ... that “foul play” was involved.

Ta-da! They don’t have a clue. The lesson: You can do whatever you want. If you’re smart. If you’re disciplined. If you take care in choosing your victims. If you don’t get greedy.

He drives by the nightclub again, passing the alley where they congregate in the shadows, waiting for any car that might pull over. He slows his motorcycle to an idle and looks to his right, directly where he knows they are. Several of them step out from the shadows into the light of the streetlamp in their skintight dresses, hiked up to show plenty of leg, their hair teased up, their boobs pushed out, hoping to make eye contact with potential customers. There are a half dozen of them, a nice variety of busty and petite, white and black and Hispanic. A smorgasbord of potential victims.

Victims . It’s fun to think of them that way. Not women but prey.

He immediately crosses the tall, leggy blonde off the list, because she is too much like Dede — though Dede ended up being great fun in the end. Still, variety is the spice of life, and, more to the point, an intelligent man like Holden realizes that he cannot leave a pattern of any kind in his wake.

He quickly narrows it down to a busty black woman and a petite blonde.

The blond one it is! Smaller, probably no more than a hundred pounds, and therefore easier to subdue, should any difficulty arise.

But why should any difficulty arise? He has his Fun Bag back at the motel. And unlike last time, when Dede and Annie surprised him, this time he’ll have the chance to show off his charm, to gain her trust, lure her in.

She’ll have no idea what’s coming. She’ll probably think the corkscrew is for a bottle of champagne. She’ll think the handcuffs are just a kinky sex thing.

She might wonder about the handheld kitchen torch, though.

It’s past midnight and there is a healthy stream of people coming and going from the club nearby. Witnesses, potentially — a careful man like Holden thinks of such things — but most are drunk and, in the end, what could they say about him? He’s wearing a helmet with a tinted face shield, and he’s removed the license plate. All anyone could possibly describe is a guy in a leather jacket wearing a helmet on a black motorcycle.