about fifteen feet from the car. It's a pure damn miracle one of the firemen didn't squash it.
“It's probably some reporter's notes from the meeting,” he said. “But you never know. Every once in a blue moon we find evidence there is a God. I've got a player somewhere on the seat there.”
“Yeah, that and the Holy Grail,” Kate muttered as she dug through the junk on the seat: reports, magazines, burger wrappers. “Are you living in this car, Sam? There are shelters for people like you, you know.”
She came up with the player and handed it to Quinn. He popped the cassette out and carefully inserted the one Kovac handed him on the end of a ballpoint pen.
What came from the tiny speaker ran through Kate like a spike. A woman's screams, thick with desperation, interspersed with breathless, broken pleas for mercy that would never be delivered. The cries of someone enduring torture and begging for death.
Not proof there was a God, Kate thought. Proof there wasn't.
23
CHAPTER
ELATION. ECSTASY. AROUSAL. These are the things he feels in his triumph, stirred into the darker emotions of anger and hatred and frustration that burn constantly inside him.
Manipulation. Domination. Control. His power extends beyond his victims, he reminds himself. He exercises the same forces over the police and over Quinn.
Never mind the rest. Focus on the win.
The intensity is overwhelming. He is shaking, sweating, flushed with excitement as he drives toward the house. He can smell himself. The odor is peculiar to this kind of excitement—strong, musky, almost sexual. He wants to wipe his armpits with his hands and rub the sweat and the scent all over his face, into his nostrils, lick it from his fingers.
He wants to strip and have the woman in his fantasies lick it all from his body. From his chest and his belly and his back. In his fantasy she ends up on her knees before him, licking his balls. His erection is huge and straining and he shoves it into her mouth and fucks her mouth, slapping her every time she gags on him. He comes in her face, then forces her down on her hands and knees and penetrates her anally. His hands around her throat, he rapes her viciously, choking her between screams.
The images excite him, arouse him. His penis is stiff and throbbing. He needs release. He needs to hear the sounds that are as sharp and beautiful as finely honed blades. He needs to hear the screams, that raw, pure quality of sound that is terror, and to pretend the screams come from the woman in his mind. He needs to hear the building crescendo as a life reaches its limit. The fading energy absorbed greedily by death.
He digs a hand into his coat pocket for the tape and finds nothing.
A wave of panic sweeps over him. He pulls to the curb and searches all pockets, checks the seat beside him, checks the floor, checks the cassette player. The tape is gone.
Anger burns through him. Huge and violent. A wall of rage. Cursing, he slams the car into gear and pulls back onto the street. He's made a mistake. Unacceptable. He knows it won't be fatal. Even if the police find the tape, even if they are able to lift a fingerprint from it, they won't find him. His prints are in no criminal database. He hasn't been arrested since his juvenile days. But the very
His triumph is now diminished. His celebration ruined. His erection has gone soft, his cock shriveling to a pathetic nub. In the back of his mind he can hear the sneering voice, the disdain as the fantasy woman gets up and walks away from him, bored and disinterested.
He pulls into the driveway, hitting the remote control for the garage door. The anger is a snake writhing inside him, oozing poison. The sound of toy-dog barking follows him into the garage. That goddamn mutt from next door. His night ruined, now this.
He gets out of the car and goes to the trash bin. The garage door is descending. The bichon makes eye contact with him, yapping incessantly, bouncing backward toward the lowering door. He pulls a dropcloth out of the garbage and turns toward the dog, already imagining scooping the dog up, then swinging the makeshift bag hard against the concrete wall again and again and again.
“Come on, Bitsy, you rotten little shit,” he murmurs in a sweet tone. “Why don't you like me? What have I ever done to you?”
The dog growls, a sound as ferocious as an electric pencil sharpener, and holds her ground, glancing back toward the door now less than a foot from sealing her fate.
“Do you know I've killed little rat dogs like you before?” he asks, smiling, stepping closer, bending down. “Do you think I smell like evil?”
He reaches a hand toward the dog. “That's because I am,” he murmurs as the dog lunges toward him, teeth bared.
The grinding of the garage door mechanism stops.
The dropcloth falls, muffling the yip of surprise.
24
CHAPTER
KATE WAS STILL shaking when they reached her house. Quinn had insisted on seeing her home for the second time that night, and she hadn't argued. The memory of the screams echoed in her head. She heard them, faint but constant, as she slipped wordlessly from the truck and left the garage, as she fumbled with the keys for the back door, as she passed through the kitchen to the hall and turned the thermostat up.
Quinn was behind her like a shadow the whole time. She expected him to say something about the burnt-out light in the garage, but if he did, she didn't hear him. She could hear only the whoosh of her pulse in her ears, the magnified rattle of keys, Thor meowing, the refrigerator humming . . . and beneath all that, the screams.
“I'm so cold,” she said, going into the study, where the desk lamp still burned and a chenille throw lay in a heap on the old sofa. She glanced at the answering machine—no blinking light—and thought of the hang-up calls that had come to her cell phone at 10:05, 10:08, 10:10.
A half-empty glass of Sapphire and tonic sat on the blotter, the ice long melted. Kate picked it up with a shaking hand and took a swallow. The tonic had gone flat, but she didn't notice, didn't taste anything at all. Quinn took the glass from her hand and set it aside, then turned her gently by the shoulders to face him.
“Aren't you cold?” she prattled on. “It takes forever for the furnace to heat this place. I should probably have it replaced—it's old as Moses—but I never think of it until the weather turns.
“Maybe I should start a fire,” she suggested, and immediately felt the blood drain from her face. “Oh, God, I can't believe I said that. All I can smell is smoke and that horrible—Jesus, what an awful—”
She swallowed hard and looked at the glass that was now out of easy reach.
Quinn laid a hand against her cheek and turned her face toward him. “Hush,” he said softly.
“But—”
“Hush.”
As carefully as if she were made of spun glass, he folded his arms around her and drew her close against him. Another invitation to lean on him, to let go. She knew she shouldn't. If she let go for even a second now, she would be lost. She needed to keep moving, keep talking,
Without defense in the arms of a man she still loved but couldn't have.
The full import of that answer was heavy enough to strain what little strength she had left, ironically tempting her further to take the support Quinn offered for now.
She had never stopped loving him. She had just put it away in a lockbox in her secret heart, never to be taken
