off. Just like that, and all I say is hello. If I could get them hot, they wouldn’t say that.”
“It’s not fair for a woman to say that to you if you’re being polite. Tell me about Jamie. Is she alive?”
“Other guys talk women into bed all the time. I see some guy talking to a girl and the next day he tells me, sure she was really good stuff. How do they do that? I could never do that. That’s what I liked about Abby. Didn’t have to talk. We just drank ourselves stupid. Then after a while she just said okay, I’m ready, let’s go fuck. Didn’t have to say anything to turn her on, didn’t have to worry about saying something that was gonna turn her off. But then she changed her mind and didn’t want to do it. I thought I had something going, but then I screwed up the money thing.”
“What money thing?”
No answer. He seemed to be studying the buttons on her blouse.
His girlfriend talk sounded juvenile and didn’t fit in with his aggressiveness in putting her in this position. She thought something was in his mind encouraging him. Control over her was the objective, but some fantasy had inspired him to corner her here. Next came the surprise.
“I can already tell you don’t have half the boobs that stripper had.”
“Did you go to a club and watch a stripper, Toby?”
“The paper said she was one of those strippers. She had the body.”
Then it clicked. What was that beach...Privado? The incident. What was it...about a stripper? Oh, god. Detective Triney had told her about it and she immediately filed it away under horrible but irrelevant. Nothing to do with the Banks shooting or the kidnapping. Not her concern. Some creep molesting a corpse. Not a crime she particularly wanted in her memory. She had her own problems and none of them had any tie-in to a naked body found on a beach. No connection whatever—unless the creep was someone she knew. No connection until now. A flow of reality made her tremble.
Did Toby see the body on Privado Beach? Or was he merely inspired by newspaper accounts? “So you read about the stripper in the paper?”
“I knew it’d be wrong, but her body was right there. It practically glowed. Something to see, but you don’t get that. I told you I liked naked women and you just said, hey no problem.”
Now she began to feel sick. Was he the one? Did he strangle the woman with something big and soft like a beach towel that left no marks, and fooled the medical examiner into thinking she had innocently choked because she had traces of pretzel in her mouth? “We really need to talk about this,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“Just lying there like she was sleeping.”
Perhaps he has been thinking about another silent body since the beach incident. A passive woman he can control. The possibility of her being killed and raped was real. A man capable of all that might be sitting there before her. She’s already helpless, what happens next, and what after that. Even if he didn’t kill her first, would he rape her and then just walk away—knowing that she knows who he is and would tell his stepmother?
“She couldn’t yell at me or make fun of me, or tell me to fuck off.”
Was she his second opportunity? Would he kill her first to relive the beach episode? That was crazy. Yet why was he here facing her with a knife. All he had to do was take a dishtowel and twist it around her neck again. She’d be unconscious in seconds, dead in minutes. Asphyxiated like the woman on the beach. Next, he’d lay waste to her and walk away.
“Good to have a girl powerless. Nice and quiet like she’s sleeping—except you can touch her all you want.”
She shuddered recognizing what this man was capable of. She had to keep her mind focused. She had to keep thinking. But her imagination began to overcome her. Her mind slipped off into panic. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t want to die. In horror she blurted out, “How many women have you raped?”
It just came out. She wasn’t trying to psych him out now. She wasn’t thinking about how to divert his attention. She was thinking about dying. Absolutely a mistake having him think about his victims, but she was terrified and had to know.
She repeated, “How many women have you raped?” She couldn’t help the quiver in her voice.
“Why are you jumping into that? You see, I can’t talk to girls. We don’t connect. What do you talk about with girls? I mean, I’ve got my sex stuff and she’s got her sex stuff. How can I just ignore that? What am I supposed to say? I held a girl’s hand once walking home from school. I thought about what she was hiding, but I didn’t say anything. You’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, do you.”
She tried to calm herself down. Think Sandy, think. Try not to say anything that would set him off. “I’m sorry, Toby. You’re right. I’ll talk to you. Do you want to talk about getting along with women?” Was that another mistake? Talking about women would get him more excited. The conversation was going around in a circle. What else is there to talk about? Sex is why he’s here.
“I’ve never raped anyone. Would I do it if nobody would find out and nothing would happen to me? Nothing bad, nothing at all?” He opened his eyes wide. “You bet I would.”
As disgusting as that sounded, he did seem to recognize guilt. It gave her a little opening. “Something bad would happen to you. Something bad would definitely happen to you. Everyone would know and you’d go to prison like your father. They’d never let you out. Everyone there would hate you. You know the worst part? You’d have to face your stepmother and you know what she’d do.”
He leaned back in the chair thinking about that. “Maybe it’d be like an invading army after conquering a village. I saw that on TV. They just grab any woman who happens to be around. Nobody’s to stop them. I guess men will do it if there’s no penalty. Most guys anyway, under the right circumstances. And you say that’s normal?”
“No, I didn’t say that.” Keep him talking, she thought. Talking about anything. Maybe Abby will come back home, maybe the phone will ring, maybe a huge meteor will crash into the house. Anything, something, everything. Possibly the guilt thing would work. “But you did rape. How can you live with yourself after what you did that night on the beach? I guess you figured you lucked out. Like finders keepers. Look what I found, guys, a helpless woman who can’t stop me.”
“Hey, I didn’t take her there. I didn’t kill her.”
“Yeah right, and you didn’t touch her body.”
“At first, I didn’t intend to do anything at all. Then I thought it wouldn’t be so wrong to just touch her. So, I shook her a little, like trying to see if she was really dead. She was soft and warm. I didn’t expect that. I thought she’d be cold and hard. She felt nice. The wind was slowly moving her hair. That seemed weird like at any moment she’d open her eyes and yell at me. Then I thought, hey, it’s just her body there. She wasn’t around to mind.”
“It’s not permitted. We’re evolved humans. We’re better than that. A dead body is off limits.”
“I didn’t do it, and nobody saw me do it.”
She didn’t know what that meant. “It’s not allowed. Do you know that?”
“Stop it. I didn’t chuck it in her!”
“Sure you didn’t. You knew she was forbidden, but there she was like low-hanging fruit.”
“I don’t know what that means. I know there wasn’t any little man on my shoulder telling me it was fucking wrong.”
“He should have shouted you’re a fucking creep.”
“I was real excited looking down at her. Getting dark by then, about like it is here now. I could see her stretched out there and she was every girl I’ve ever wanted to touch. All of them right there. My whole body throbbed. I couldn’t stop...you know...I juiced out just looking at her. Not as good as the real thing, but still exciting. After doing that, I felt bad and was afraid someone would know what happened so I’d better get out of there fast. After I’d driven away and no one saw me, I thought, wow, was she really spread out there like that? I started feeling good like everything was okay. I got excited again and that’s when I thought about going back.”
“You shouldn’t have gone back, Toby, that was wrong. You knew it was wrong. That’s why you feel so bad about what you did. You must let me go, so you’ll start feeling good again.”
“Wish I could start over with all of it. You should do things when you have the chance. Smart guys don’t pass up something handed to them.”
Which was it? Did he feel guilty because he did it, or regret not taking advantage of his chance? “Toby, did you go back or didn’t you?”
He wasn’t listening. The fantasy was still in his head. After a moment he continued, “You know the movie I
