Once on the road, he realized there was a world of difference between serial killers and recreational ones. The first kind kill because some evil compulsion forces them to. The second ones do it for the fun of it—because they want to.
Breathing deeply, he fondled the swatch of bright red silk. Rochelle. She was the one who had shown him the rules and taught him how to play the tne. Once he knew how simple it was to fake the cops out and trick them into looking the other way, everything else was easy.
All six pairs of panties were out on the table now, laying there in full view. Allowing himself to become excited again, he studied them under the glow of the candle’s flickering light, stroking each one in turn. One at a time, he held five of the six up to his face once more, trying to make up his mind.
As he did so, his heartbeat quickened. Which would it be tonight? Which one should he choose? Other than Rochelle, he had never raped his victims, not at the time. He knew better than that. DNA tests were far too reliable these days, and some cops were a whole lot smarter than they looked. Besides, he didn’t want to pick up some kind of sexually transmitted disease. One way or another, all women were whores. When it came to that, he believed in the old adage, Better safe than sorry.
At the time he was doing it, he enjoyed killing them. That was satisfying in a way, but he took his real pleasure from them later on, over and over, in the privacy of his own home. There—with the doors carefully closed and locked, with the blinds pulled, and with a scented candle burning on the table—they offered him the relief he craved. No questions asked.
By then his breath was coming in short, sharp gasps. His pants were bulging so badly that it hurt. He breathed a sigh of relief when he finally opened the zipper and allowed the caged prisoner to roam free. A moment later his other hand settled on newest prize in his collection—Serena Grijalva’s thin white cotton briefs.
It didn’t take long. He grasped himself and masturbated into the soft material, groaning with pleasure when he came. Afterward, he hurried to bathroom and washed out the panties with soap and water before hanging them on the towel bar to dry. Then he went back to the kitchen table, turned on the overhead light, and blew out the candle.
Sitting down once more, he picked up a single piece of paper that had slipped out of sight temporarily under Maddy Piper’s black lace panties. The paper was a fragment hastily torn from the corner of a yellow legal pad. A few words had been noted on it in painstakingly careful printing. “Rhonda Weaver Norton,” it said. “Fourteen twenty-five Apache Boulevard, number six, Tempe, Arizona.”
Using a strip of tape, he fastened the piece of paper to the bottom of the box and then sat there for a moment, admiring his handiwork.
“Rhonda,” the man whispered aloud. “Rhonda, Rhonda, Rhonda. You’d better watch out, little girl. The big bad wolf is coming to get you.”
CHAPTER TWO
Joanna Brady zipped the last suitcase shut and then sat down on the edge of the bed. “Off you go,” she said to her daughter, who was sprawled crosswise on the bed, thumbing through a stack of family photos.
“I like this one best,” Jenny said, plucking one out of the stack and handing it to her mother. The picture had been taken by Joanna’s father, Big Hank Lathrop, with his Brownie Hawkeye camera. The irregularly sized, old-fashioned, black-and?white snapshot showed an eight-year-old Joanna Lathrop, dressed in her Brownie uniform. She stood at attention in front of her mother’s old Maverick. In the foreground cartons of Girl Scout cookies were stacked into a Radio Flyer wagon.
Joanna was almost thirty years old now. Big Hank Lathrop had been dead for fifteen years, but as Joanna held the photo in her hand she missed her father more than she could have thought possible. She missed him almost as much as she missed her deputy sheriff husband, Andy, who had died a victim of the country’s continuing war on drugs only two months earlier.
It took real effort for her to speak around the word-trapping
