Warren Murphy: Blood Lust

"Kimmo, what are you doing?" Mrs. Baynes repeated.

"Hold still, Gramma," Kimberly said, pushing down hard.

Alarmed, Mrs. Baynes tried to rise. But the strong hands only pushed harder. They were irresistible.

"Kimberly," Mrs. Baynes said, dread flooding her voice. "Are those hands yours?"

Then there came a tremendous ripping sound, like a sail in a storm. She couldn't imagine what it was. But the remorseless hands on her shoulders shook in frantic sympathy.

That really alarmed Mrs. Baynes. She struggled to regain her feet, the tea service forgotten. It clattered to the rug.

And while she struggled, a flash of bright yellow crossed her field of vision, and she found it increasingly hard to breathe.

She touched her throat. Mrs. Baynes felt something silky, and her thoughts flashed to the yellow scarf that had been in Calley's clay hands.

"Kimberly, this is not funny. I can barely breathe."

The silk constricted. When Mrs. Baynes really, really could no longer breathe, she brought the other hand up to fight the tightening noose. It refused to budge.

She grabbed the cruel, tightening fingers. They were implacable. The edges of Mrs. Baynes's vision began to darken. The roaring sound in her ears reminded her of a seashell sound, but greatly magnified.

"She loves it," Kimberly sang through the growing blood roar. "She loves it."

Allison Baynes tried to tell Kimberly that she didn't in fact enjoy being choked, but since no air could squeeze past her windpipe, speaking was impossible.

And as her mind darkened, Mrs. Baynes was struck by a very odd thought.

If these were Kimberly's hands holding her down, whose were tightening the yellow scarf?

The police found Mrs. Allison Baynes hunched and kneeling in the middle of her living room, nose and forehead pressed into the rug, surrounded by the scattered pieces of her silver tea set. Her eyes bulged in an incredulous death stare. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth, a rich purplish-black. Robin's-egg blue was the color of her face.

Detective Oscar Sale took one look and rushed out of the house.

"We got another one," he called to the medical examiner.

The medical examiner was overseeing two morgue attendants as they rolled a sheet-covered gurney out of the house to a waiting ambulance.

The M.E. fingered one ear forward. "What?"

"Same method-looks like a ligature strangulation."

The M.E. hurried over to the house.

"What?" he repeated.

Detective Sale led the M.E. to the front door, saying, "The door was ajar. No one answered, so I pushed it. That's what I found."

The medical examiner looked in. When he saw Mrs. Baynes, curled in a kneeling fetal position like a hibernating larva, he said, "Jesus, just like the Quinlan woman. Better check every house on the block. We could have a serial killer running loose."

But they never found the killer. Although they did find a large moist spot in an upstairs bedroom whose irregular edges were flecked with bits of a whitish substance that they rushed in evidence bags to an FBI forensics laboratory in Washington.

When the report came back that the whitish substance was common modeling clay, they decided it was not important and focused on finding Mrs. Baynes's missing granddaugter, Kimberly.

All they found of her was a shredded yellow dashiki that looked as if it had been savagely torn from its owner's body. It was found stuffed into a trashcan five houses down the street.

A nationwide alert was posted for a possible sex-maniac killer, but since no one knew what he looked like, all the lawenforcement authorities could do was wait until he struck again.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he wasn't asking for much. Just someone to kill.

"C'mon, Smitty," Remo said testily. "Give me a name. Or an address. Anything." Traffic hummed behind him, exhaust fumes thickening the humid summer air.

"Where are you, Remo?" came the voice of Dr. Harold W. Smith. It was an astringent voice, one that might have been produced by a larynx cured in lemon juice.

"In a phone booth, okay?" Remo snapped. "And I'm running out of quarters. Just give me someone to hit."

"Remo, I think you should come in." Smith's voice was suddenly tender with concern. Now it sounded like a hasp sawing wood. For Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium, that unpleasant sound constituted tenderness.

"Smith," Remo said with sudden fierceness, "are you hunched over your computer?"

"I am at my desk, yes," Smith allowed. "I would not describe myself as hunched. I take pride in my posture."

"Take it from me," Remo growled, "you're hunched. Look, you've got a computer full of bad guys. I just want one. I don't care where he is. I don't care who he is. I'll go there. Just give me somebody-anybody-to hit."

"If I do this, will you return to Folcroft?"

"Maybe," Remo said noncommittally.

"That is not a satisfactory answer," Smith returned stiffly.

"It's not a freaking satisfactory world!" Remo shouted suddenly.

Miles away, the earpiece against Harold Smith's ear actually buzzed with the force of Remo's shouting.

Adjusting his rimless eyeglasses on his patrician nose, Smith shouldered the phone closer to his ear so that both hands were free to attack his desktop computer keyboard. As he reached forward, his back fell into a natural stoop.

"What city, please?" Smith asked stiffly.

"Tacoma."

"I have a report of a crack house on Jane Street. Number 334."

"Great!" Remo said joyously. "Just what I need. A crack house. It might take all of thirty minutes to clear it out. Thanks, Smitty. I owe you one."

"Remo, wait!" Smith called urgently.

The click in Smith's ear was final. Harold Smith hung up, and addressed his humming computer. He input a command that would scan all incoming data feeds for reported violence in Tacoma, Washington. He wondered how long it would take until the computer verified that the crack house on 334 Jane Street had been violently cleared of its criminal element.

Of Remo Williams' success, he had absolutely no doubt.

It took one hour and fifty-seven minutes.

It broke down this way: Eight minutes for Remo to hail a cab and be whisked to the target neighborhood. Fourteen-point-seven minutes for the assignment itself, and a total of six minutes for the news of the Jane Street Massacre-as it was subsequently dubbed-to hit the wire services, from which it was conveyed to Harold Smith a nation away in Rye, New York, in the form of luminous green letters on a glareproof screen.

The remaining one hour and seven-point-three minutes constituted the police-response time from the time 911 received the first estimated body count from concerned Jane Street neighbors. That number was five. Before the call was concluded, it was seven. Before it was all over, the death toll was twenty-three.

Soapy Suggs was number five.

He loitered inside the front door to 334 Jane Street unaware of the four bodies sprawled on the sidewalk outside. Not that he would much have cared. They were satisfied customers, passing around a crack pipe in the battered Camaro because they had been in too big a hurry to get high to bother driving somewhere less public. No big deal. In Soapy's line of work, customers had a high mortality rate.

Soapy heard the polite knock on the door and grew immediately suspicious. Nobody knocked polite on his door. Not thrill-hungry uptown yuppies. Not the police. And definitely not the neighborhood.

He bounced off an overstuffed chair, grabbing a Mac-10, which he cocked with a quick, nervous jerk.

Soapy threw open the door, leaning so his gun hand was hidden by the jamb.

A man stood there with his arms folded impatiently.

"Yeah?" Soapy asked. "Whatchu want?" He didn't notice the corpse-filled Camero out on the curb. His eyes were on the man. He was a white dude. Roughly six feet tall, but looking taller because he was so skinny.