told of a meager upbringing. It was obvious she was unread, that she did very little thinking beyond what was between her legs and who was the current teen idol. She was perhaps eighteen, maybe more, and she had the hard look of a girl who liked to drink and party whenever she could find it.
She smoked fiendishly.
He must have looked strange to her, grand in a way, certainly not what she was used to. He was much older, dressed in a suit and tie, driving a nice van. He was old enough to be her father. In a sense he had made her his, hadn't he?
She was foul-mouthed, and she dressed like the teen idol Madonna, which made her look like a tramp. She did dope whenever she could get it.
He had certainly broken her of all her bad habits in one fell swoop…
When he had fooled her into taking that trip with him, she had said, “I'll help you, if you'll help me.”
She'd wanted a ride and a smoke, preferably grass. She got the ride and something a great deal stronger than weed. Then she got something she never bargained for, something that would make her live forever, so long as he chose to go on living forever. She is dead now, but still some blood trickles down the long, tapering neck, catching at the upside-down chin where it drips from the arched Adam's apple… and he catches the blood in his hands… uses it like holy water, rubs it into his face. Feels it against his skin, the smell of it-her essence-eases his tense nerves. He wants to remember the moment… but it's fast fading, the images weakening with every hour that passes.
He wanted to go back to that moment.
Preserve Candy and that moment in his mind.
He reached over for the Nikon shots that he had snapped of Candy-before and after shots from every angle, catching her in the pose that fed him.
Beside him, on the floor, stood the icebox and the mason jars. He went about the business now of packing the overflow away. His home freezer needed stocking, and thanks to Candy, it was looking much better.
A neighbor's dog was barking, causing an eruption of other dogs to pierce the evening sky with their howls. There was a bright moon out and the dogs saw shadows moving everywhere. His was a quiet area, peaceful really, the backyard barbecues rusty from their long winter's wait, fences crumbling with age and neglect. It was an older neighborhood, to be sure, the houses in the district erected in the late sixties. Still there weren't a lot of pestering little ones about the front yard and the street, and while the houses looked their age, only an occasional salesman showed up at the door.
Inside, he had all the comforts he required, mostly medical books and magazines. He even had a copy of Gray's Anatomy published before the days when such a masterpiece could have been mass-produced on flimsy paper at a reduction in print size. The book had been a prized possession of his grandfather's, a man he had never known.
He must be certain that absolutely no trace of Candy's blood be found on the tools of his trade. The blood itself, if packs in the icebox, would not long be in his possession. Melanie's was already depleted to a final pack, and Janel was soon to follow.
He was careful with his jars of blood. In the morning, he would transfer the blood into plasma packs, boxes of which he kept on hand. The stored blood would keep better that way and take up less room in his freezer.
For want of a better name, he labeled his jars Candy, so as not to be confused with Melanie, Janel or Toni, three earlier contributors to his supply. He kept one jar of Candy in the door of his refrigerator, some to fill his A.M. appetite, some for slides. In the morning, he'd have a microscopic look at Candy's blood, in order to determine its finer qualities, or if it possessed any unwholesome aspect. During the heat of conquest, such concerns could not be contended with.
His work was near done. He securely placed each jar atop the other with a little glass clink, unloading the cooler labeled Specimens. He had brought it in from the van. He'd waved at Jonstone down the street as he carried in the stuff. Jonstone was an insomniac, and it wasn't unusual to find him walking his dog even at three in the morning.
From the bottom of the cooler, he now lifted a small vial with a cork top. This he placed in the sink to be sterilized and reused later. Staring at the vial, it reflected the light over the sink, and he mused on its having been heated earlier by him, using his Bic lighter. He had stared through the flame at the dangling carcass. Alongside the slender tube resting in suds in his sink, he now placed an array of sullied items: a thermometer, a surgeon's scalpel, a pair of probes, a clamp, and a device he had only recently given a name to: the spigot.
Now he went to the case of fine steel knives and instruments gleaming in the weak light. He hadn't remembered wiping them clean, but he had. He now closed the cooler and the case, and he began to feel a little fatigued. He had driven a long way to get home. He went into the bathroom, peeling away his shirt, revealing a broad, hairy chest and a stomach that spilled over his pants top, the navel buried within flesh, unseen. He'd been dieting, watching the fried and fatty foods whenever he was on the road, but it seemed to be doing nothing for the midsection where all his extra weight appeared one day when he woke up and examined himself closely and critically. He wasn't terribly obese, just enough to cause a bulge all around him and to strain the buttons of his shirts. He'd taken to wearing oversized ties to business meetings to cover the area at his navel, but there was only so much that could be covered.
His face, too, was overlarge, the cheeks ballooning out, his jowls inflated to the point of hiding his better features, the distinct, dark crystal-blue eyes. He'd never had so large a head before. Why now? What was he to do about it? The only parts of his anatomy that seemed untouched by his sudden weight gain were his sinewy, taut limbs. The weights he lifted helped out here. And the blood diet was helping curb his appetite, he believed.
The years had taken their toll on his complexion as well. He was ashen, the graying hair making him even more ashen in appearance. It made doing business harder, both in the daylight hours and at night. He was a colorless man, had always been a colorless man, with a low opinion of himself on account of how lowly he was regarded by just about everyone he came into contact with. Most people treated him as if he were a filing cabinet, and an empty one at that. All his life. But he was a great deal more interesting than anyone suspected.
Still, he must face the fact that he was at a crucial point in his life. He had read a lot about patterns and phases of growth, stages that a man went through. This was one of them, contracting the fat tummy and the fat jowls. He vowed not to let it get the best of him, and so, as tired as he was, he did his push-ups and sit-ups before showering and lying back on the bed. In the shower, his mind had wandered back to the scene of the murder. The hot shower water was like her blood in its warmth.
In bed, his mind wandered back again to the details of the killing. He returned to survey the crumbling, filthy, odor-ridden old place in the woods miles from the main roads. He then methodically found the precise instruments that he required in the briefcase he had on hand, in order to open a vein and drain Candy of what he wanted from her. He dwelled on this, allowing the moment to cradle him to sleep. His rest was deep and peaceful, stirred only by the unpleasant flashes regarding the need for the imprecise, heavy-duty equipment he'd used on Candy.
He had had to return to the van, placing the murder weapons in a secret compartment, putting the camera filled with the negatives of the killing on the seat. From the rear now he pulled forth his battery-operated hacksaw, a nice toy. He then returned to stand before the body, deciding what touches would be best.
The hum of the hacksaw was welcome in the deafening silence of the place; he carefully sliced away the breasts before mutilating the vagina. There was next to no wasted blood. He counted on the horror of the mutilation to confound local police, send them scouring the countryside for a lunatic escaped from an asylum perhaps, or the town weirdo, or a recluse of the woods. Certainly, no one would be looking for a man like him.
When he'd done with his final cuts, he stepped back to look at the result, casting a roving, critical eye over the corpse. He started away, but at the door he stopped and returned.
“ What the hell,” he said aloud, touching the hacksaw almost gently to where her shoulder and arm met, severing the ligaments on all sides. With a gentle tug of his gloved hand, the bone separated neatly from its socket, and with a final flourish, he threw the arm across the room.
He was about to leave when he remembered one of his scalpels in the kitchen. He had left it in the basin. As he passed the corpse again, he also recalled the hospital tourniquet tied tightly about her neck, and the pink ribbon in her hair which he had placed there. He snatched this away, too. He didn't want to leave any clues save those that would befuddle and misguide the authorities, like her severed arm and the mutilated genitals.
Earlier, he had fished out the vial of semen from the cooler in his van. The semen belonged to another man, someone he didn't even know. He had warmed it to room temperature, then poured some into the dead woman's
