Wrath White - The Resurrectionist

“Thank you, God,” he whispered.

Dale looked over his shoulder at the body rolling around the backseat. That black bitch had almost killed him. He had gotten lucky. Not lucky — blessed. God had been on his side. He was on a mission of love, and love was the most powerful force in the universe. He would bring the black detective back and then he would make her talk and then he and Sarah Lincoln would be reunited. He didn’t care if it took all night. This time he would be patient. He wouldn’t rush it. He would start with her fingers and keep cutting until she told him everything he wanted to know. She was tough, but everyone had their limits and he was determined.

Sarah watched a couple fighting in the courtyard only a few feet from her door. The woman had an infant in her arms and was feeding him a bottle even as she continued to berate the man Sarah assumed was the baby’s father. The man was clearly intoxicated and was swaying and staggering as the woman poked a finger at his face and yelled in a shrill voice that felt like it was peeling the skin off the inside of Sarah’s ears. The woman had apparently found another woman’s phone number on her husband’s cell phone and then he had come home several hours late from work reeking of perfume and alcohol. The woman was so angry she was practically screaming. Her voice rose to such a high pitch that Sarah could not understand a single word and doubted that the woman’s husband could either.

The man smiled drunkenly and closed his eyes as if reliving some pleasant memory, clearly not listening to whatever the woman was trying to communicate to him. That further aggravated the woman, who slapped him hard across the mouth with the baby’s bottle, splitting his lip and dropping him down onto the seat of his pants. That woke him up. He staggered to his feet and began shouting back at her. That was apparently what the woman had wanted. She continued to yell at her husband, pointing the bottle she had just slapped him with as she berated him about all his failures as a man, only now she was smiling.

Sarah watched a little longer, then turned back to her empty room. Detective Torres had come to the room a couple hours ago to drive Josh to work. Sarah had been trying to amuse herself and keep her mind off her situation ever since. She had tried to work on her dissertation but still could not get into it, so she had given up on it after writing, and then deleting, two pages of research notes. Then she had gone to the window to spy on the neighbors. She watched a short Latino woman with gorgeous legs and a pair of breasts every bit as full and perky as her own lead a middleaged man in a crinkled suit into her room. The man in the suit was nervously looking around to make sure no one was watching him as he crossed the courtyard with the woman. Sarah was pretty sure that the Latino woman was a prostitute working out of her motel room. She watched kids playing soccer and Frisbee in the courtyard and mothers carrying armloads of laundry and groceries. Then the couple had started fighting and the entire courtyard had stopped to watch.

Sarah was scared. This was about the worst time she could have ever imagined for her to be alone in a strange motel room. Sarah picked up her cell phone and dialed eleven for Detective Lassiter. The phone rang five times before the voice mail answered.

“Hello, you have reached Detective Trina Lassiter with the North Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. I am unavailable right now. Please leave your name, number, and a brief message and I will return your call.”

Sarah hung up the phone and hit redial. Again the phone rang five times.

“Hello, you have reached Detective Trina Lassiter with the North Las Vegas…”

Sarah hung up the phone and tossed it onto the bed. She looked at her running shoes and sighed. It had been days since she had gotten in a good run. She still did not really feel like running but sitting around the motel room was driving her crazy. Sarah grabbed her Asics running shoes and sat down on the edge of the bed. She considered calling Josh to tell him that she would be out jogging in case he called and could not get a hold of her, but she knew that his cell phone would probably be in his locker at work and by the time he got the message she would already be done with her run. She decided to try Detective Lassiter one more time. She picked up the phone and hit the speed dial. Once again she got the voice mail greeting. This time she left a message.

“Hello Trina, this is Sarah Lincoln. I just wanted you to know that I was going out for a jog. I didn’t want you to panic if you called or came by and I wasn’t here. I’ll be back in an hour. It’s almost six o’clock now. I’ll call you back when I get in.”

She called Detective Malcovich next. He didn’t answer either. Sarah guessed that they might have both been in the same meeting somewhere or working on a case or in court or whatever else cops did when they weren’t protecting her from supernatural sex murderers. She left a message for him as well.

“Hello, Harry. It’s Sarah Lincoln. I just wanted you to know that I was going out for a jog in case you dropped by to check on me. I’ll be back by seven. It’s six o’clock now.”

Sarah hung up, picked up her keys, and walked out the door. She had forgotten to pack her water bottles. Luckily, she had remembered her Garmin. She turned it on, then waited for it to locate a satellite. She quickly keyed in a six-mile course and began jogging up Tropicana, away from the strip. She passed the Adult Superstore and tried not to think about how long it had been since she’d had sex with her husband, let alone did anything freaky with him. She didn’t know if she could ever walk into a store like that again without thinking about what that pervert had done to her. She jogged up toward the Orleans Hotel and almost got hit by a car trying to cross Arville Street. There was another sex-toy and apparel shop on the next block. Sarah had never realized before how many of these shops there were in Vegas. She guessed that it was like smoking. You never realized how many smokers there were in the city until you quit and were constantly being accosted by their smoke. That’s how she felt now, accosted by all the commercialized fetishistic sex.

She barely looked at the new strip club that had just opened up across the street from the Orleans as she picked up her pace, enjoying the feel of the wind on her face even if the air was warm and congested with car exhaust fumes. It was better than being cooped up in a motel room worried about being raped and murdered. The Garmin beeped, telling her to pick up her speed, and Sarah lengthened her stride.

Detective Lassiter was a ruin. Dale had skinned the fingers on her right hand one by one, cutting around the base of each digit with a scalpel and then jerking the skin off with a pair of Robogrip pliers like he were removing a condom. She still had not told him where Sarah was. So Dale had gotten more creative. He boiled a pot of water and stuck her other hand in it until it began to blister. Then he took the scalpel and the pliers and de-gloved her entire hand. He wished that he could have removed the gag from her mouth so he could have listened to her screams. They must have been exquisite, he thought.

The detective was strapped to the chair with silver duct tape. Her arms, legs, and head were completely immobilized. She had been almost mummified in tape. He had ripped open her shirt and torn off her bra. Then he had begun cutting on her breasts. He tried to imagine that she were Sarah but her breasts were bigger and flabbier than Sarah’s. They looked more like his mother’s, only in a different, darker color. Dale remembered what his father had done to his mother’s breasts on the night he died.