The killer began to lean in, causing the skin to puncture.
He withdrew it before it went in any great distance, then began to walk back toward the basement door and into the night air. As he did, he turned and looked at her.
“You’re not even worth the trouble,” he said, in a voice so angry that it wasn’t human.
Cathy turned to face the Womb, to look Xander in the eyes after what he’d just said. There was nothing there but darkness and moonlight, and the stench of blood that was already seeping down from the two dead bodies upstairs.
She turned back into the pile of dirty, sweaty, flower-printed laundry, crying as she finally heard the sirens approaching the house.
Don Smith clenched both his hands in his hair as he stared down at the stack of papers in front of him, pulling until he could feel the tug against his roots.
The rest of the halls and offices of Beach News Daily were dark that night. He was the only staff member working late, something he’d gotten used to in his years of service.
It was a small office located in Coral Beach’s lone strip mall, with its own glass-door entrance that was shattered on a monthly basis by idiotic teens looking for cash and finding only bound copies of old newspapers. Once they’d taken a computer. The space had three offices and four employees, making it constantly obvious who resided at the bottom of the pecking order. The editor, the ad salesman and the head reporter, Drake, each got their own.
Drake had the corner one with windows that opened up to the forest behind the mall. Don had a cubicle-sized storage room with a computer made in 1991 and a printer that constantly spewed toner.
On the wall were small-press awards the paper had won, along with many empty spots for more plaques and certificates to go. They had not been filled in some time, something the editor made them aware of constantly.
Don worked day and night trying to find that one good story that might point his career in the right direction. Then, he and his son could move out of that junk house in the crap part of town and into the city, where he could get the big stories, lead a real life and make his son proud of him for the first time since his mother died.
He brushed a hand through his thinning brown hair, displacing the comb over he’d long since stopped believing was anything close to convincing. Staring down at the pile of papers, contacts and photos on his desk, he saw the stories that had consumed his life and career. ‘Mayor cuts ribbon at new hospital wing.’ ‘Summer Games in Full Swing.’ ‘Less Youth Voting.’ Stories that he thought proved the theory that if you put enough monkeys in a room with a typewriter, eventually they would produce Shakespeare... or at the very least, reasonably competent journalism.
A month ago, he thought he had written that ticket with a series of stories on the ‘Midnight Massacre’. Detective Carl Dent had given him full access to police files and profiles that had been worked up on the murderer. What he’d found in them had sent chills down his spine and brought a smirk to his lips as he thought of the public’s reaction to such a story. Dent’s forensic psychiatrists had the killer pegged as being somewhere in his late teens to early twenties, around his own son’s age. In fact could have been one of his son’s friends, a notion which he’d forced himself not to consider at the time. They were male and Caucasian, most likely from a broken home (although Dent had focused on an adoptee as a good candidate). They were non-smokers and had real upper-body power. More than that, they had control. Up until each victims last breath every strike had been perfect and pristine. There had been no hesitation lines along any of the wound tracts. It was only after each person died that they got the attention that had turned them each into grotesquely mutilated works of anger. The killer never seemed to really cut loose until after the kill had been made.
The material had spoken for itself. It almost needed no work or dramatization. He could have simply stuck a by-line on it and sent it to the editor, but instead he had worked it into a piece of journalistic gold then started planning his vacation to Cuba.
Less than forty-eight hours after the story had gone to print, Genblade had been arrested. Not in his late teens or early twenties. Not from a broken home. Not anywhere close to his profile. The editor had almost torn him a new asshole... and Drake had gotten the story of Genblade’s capture –a story that had attracted national publicity and been run on almost every news outlet, all of which Drake had received royalty checks for.
He glared past the old-fashioned typewriter he kept on his desk for show and at the computer screen, its harsh artificial glow stinging at his eyes. It was the page that the editor had asked him to lay out and no matter what he did, he could not make the Blockbuster ad fit with his story. Which meant, incidentally, that the story would probably have to be cut down. He thought briefly that he could add some space by removing his by-line. He didn’t particularly want his name on anything he wrote lately anyway.
Out in the lobby, he heard the fax machine buzz to life and start to churn out paper. Frowning, he looked at his watch, shaking it twice to make sure it was right.
“The hell sends a fax at this hour?” he grumbled, stepping out into the main office and switching on the light. After a moment’s pause, the lights hummed to life and
